Today is a day we will never forget.
The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson has been shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction and in doing so, Cassava Republic Press has become the first Black-owned African independent publisher to reach the shortlist in the prize’s 30-year history.
This news is coming in the same month we turn twenty years old. We started in Abuja in 2006 with no capital, no contacts and no roadmap, just an unshakeable conviction that stories from the African world, owned by Africans, belonged to the world.
The Mercy Step is the story of Mercy, the youngest child of a Windrush-generation Jamaican family in 1960s Bradford, navigating a household shaped by her father’s violence and her mother’s fierce love. It is Marcia Hutchinson’s debut novel. She became a full-time writer at sixty.
That is the book on the shortlist today and we’re so very proud.
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, our Founder and Publishing Director, said: “We are honoured, and we are proud. This is why independent, Black-owned publishing matters. Not as a corrective to the mainstream, but as a home. A place where a writer can debut at sixty. Where a story rooted in Black British life can be treated with the full literary ambition it deserves. 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 winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on 11 June 2026. The paperback edition of The Mercy Step is available from 30 April 2026.
Thank you to every reader, bookseller and supporter who has walked this road with us. We’re only here because of you.
— The Cassava Republic Team
