At the Pontas Agency, we’re gearing up for the publication of so many great titles in 2026. One of them will be The Shipikisha Club by multi-award-winning Zambian and US-based Mubanga Kalimamukwento which was winner of the 2024 Dzanc Prize for Fiction! It will be published in the original English by Dzanc Books in the US and Canada, Cassava Republic Press in the UK, and Jacana Media in South Africa in 2026.
Some translation publishers are already onboard: French rights were preempted by Éditions de L’Aube, Italian rights pre-empted by Astoria, and Portuguese rights for Brazil pre-empted by Ímã Editorial. All other translation rights are currently available.
Set in Zambia, The Shipikisha Club tells the story of Sali, a working mother of three on trial for the murder of her husband, Kasunga. Through a braided narrative woven both before and during the trial, Sali navigates her husband’s infidelities and alcohol-filled nights, their money troubles, her postnatal depression, raising her teenage daughter Ntashé, and an attempted abortion in silence. Until the day her marriage finally fails to endure—shipikisha, considered the ultimate dereliction of wifely duty in Zambia. Until the day she speaks her mind, and Kasunga puts a gun in her face.
Mubanga is also the winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, judged by Angie Cruz, for her short story collection Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), which also won a Minnesota Book Award, was longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and was selected as a Debutiful Best Debut Book of 2024 and a Boston Globe Top 75 Book of 2024, among other accolades. Her debut novel The Mourning Bird (Jacana Media, 2019) won the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award in 2019 and was listed among the 15 most notable debut books of the year by Brittle Paper. She is a previous winner of the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest and the 2019 Kalemba Short Story Prize.
For more information about the above title, please contact Anna Soler-Pont (anna@pontas-agency.com).