Many hearty congratulations to Frank Thabani Sayi, author of No Safer Kinder Hatred: How Racial Hatred and Ethnic Violence Shaped Zimbabwe, who has just won the 2026 Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland Prize! You can see his understandably emotional response when he was told the news here on Instagram.
Here is the announcement, from the video’s caption:
Congratulations to this year’s winner of the RSL Christopher Bland Prize, Frank Thabani Sayi for his memoir No Safer Kinder Hatred.
Sayi’s memoir tells of a childhood conditioned in the shadow of the mayhem brought about by the structure and dehumanising effects of colonialism, its dreadful legacy, and the impact of civil war. Chair of judges A.L. Kennedy surprised Sayi with the news and told him that reading No Safer Kinder Hatred was ‘not just meeting the writer, it’s meeting something deep within you that’s courageous and extraordinary and true.‘
We offer our thanks to this year’s judges A.L. Kennedy, Derek Owusu and Louise Kennedy, as well as the Bland family for their support of this prize. The prize, now in its eighth year, is an annual award of £10,000 given to a debut novelist or non-fiction writer first published aged 50 or over.
HRB asked Frank for a comment, and this is what he said:
The HRB was one of the very first platforms to showcase my work and to share it with the rest of the world. And this award is testament to the fact that stories such as mine can only be heard with the help and support of others. Thank you for all your support—Frank Thabani Sayi
Learn what HRB thought of the book in our review here.
And you can also read his answers to some questions HRB had about it: An interview with Frank Thabani Sayi, author of No Safer Kinder Hatred.
Harare Review of Books 
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