Parrésia Press, the Nigerian publishing house founded by Azafi Omoluabi and Richard Ali, has won the CANEX Prize for Publishing 2026. The winning title is South Side, a novel by Professor Akin Adesokan. The announcement came on Friday evening at Creative Africa Nexus Weekend, known as CANEX WKND 2026, held at the Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and Creative Arts in Iganmu, Lagos.
The gathering brings together participants from over 80 countries and runs through Sunday, November 8. The timing feels charged. For three days, Lagos has been the room where conversations about who owns African stories, and who profits from them, have played out in real time. A Nigerian publisher taking the prize on home soil adds its own punctuation to that debate.
This is the third edition of the prize, and it has traced a clear arc across the continent. Cassava Republic Press of Nigeria won the inaugural edition in October 2024 in Algiers for Female Fear Factory: Unravelling Patriarchy's Cultures of Violence by South African author Pumla Dineo Gqola, with editor Layla Mohamed collecting the $20,000 award. Cape Town's Karavan Press then won in 2025 for Thobeka Yose's In Silence My Heart Speaks, also in Algiers at the Intra-African Trade Fair, drawing more than 80 submissions that year.
The prize is part of Afreximbank's CANEX Book Factory, which also runs a creative writing workshop for emerging writers and the CANEX Book Fair. Judging weighs editorial quality, book design and production, innovation, distribution and cultural impact. The focus is the publisher's full craft, not the manuscript alone.
For 2026, the prize widened its scope, dropping "in Africa" from its name and opening eligibility to publishers from CARICOM member states. The jury was chaired by Nigerian author and academic Professor Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, joined by South African literary scholar Professor Polo Moji and Kenyan poet and broadcaster Khainga O'Okwemba. Where the prize travels next, and who it finds, is now the question.
Originally published by African Business.