When Bibi Bakare-Yusuf launched Cassava Republic Press from Nigeria's capital city twenty years ago, the global literary establishment was not paying attention. It is now.
The Abuja-founded independent publisher announced this week that Marcia Hutchinson's debut novel, The Mercy Step, has been shortlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction, making Cassava Republic the first African and Black women-owned small press in the prize's three-decade history to reach that stage.
The recognition lands in the same month the press turns twenty.
"We are honoured, and we are proud," Bakare-Yusuf, the press's founder and publishing director, said in a statement.
"We started in Abuja twenty years ago with passion and an unshakeable belief that African storytelling belonged to the world. Today, the world agrees."
The Women's Prize for Fiction, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the English-speaking world, will announce its £30,000 winner on June 11 in London.
The Mercy Step is itself an unlikely story. Hutchinson, a British-Jamaican lawyer, community activist, and MBE recipient, published the novel - her first - at sixty.
More than fifty publishers passed on the manuscript before Cassava Republic took it on.
Set in 1960s Bradford, England, the novel centres on Mercy, the youngest child of a Windrush-generation Jamaican family, coming of age inside a household defined by her father's violence, her mother's faith, and the bonds between siblings.
The Observer called it "dark and humorous storytelling that passionately captures the unique realities of the northern Black experience."
Actor and author Paterson Joseph described it as "a moving and perfectly observed slice of Black British life with the hallmarks of a modern classic."
Two Decades of Being Unique
For Nigerian readers and the broader African literary community, the significance of the shortlisting extends well beyond one novel or one author.
Cassava Republic has spent two decades doing what larger, better-resourced publishers in London and New York routinely declined to do: treating African and diaspora writing as world literature, not a niche product.
The numbers bear that out. Since its founding, the press has published nearly 150 titles, sold over six million copies, and seen its authors' works translated into 30 languages across more than 60 countries.
Its roster includes some of the most celebrated names in contemporary African writing: Teju Cole, Elnathan John, Lola Shoneyin and Toni Kan, among others.
The press has also accumulated a shelf of industry recognition, including the British Book Awards Small Press of the Year in 2019, the London Book Fair Excellence Award for Inclusivity in 2017, and, most recently, the AfriExim Bank CANEX Prize for Publishing in Africa in 2025.
That a publisher headquartered in Abuja, not London, not New York, now stands on the Women's Prize shortlist is the kind of moment that tends to reframe assumptions about where serious literature comes from, and who gets to publish it.
The paperback edition of The Mercy Step is available from April 30.
