NoViolet Bulawayo has been awarded the Best of Caine prize in 2025 for her short story Hitting Budapest, bringing renewed attention to a work that first won her the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2011. The Best of Caine is an honorary prize, created this year to mark the 25th anniversary of the Caine Prize, and re-recognises past winning stories. This award shows not only that Hitting Budapest has enduring power, but also how Bulawayo’s voice has resonated over time.

Born Elizabeth Zandile Tshele in 1981 in Tsholotsho, Zimbabwe, Bulawayo took her pen name as a tribute: “NoViolet” combining “No”, meaning “with” in Ndebele, and her mother’s name Violet, plus Bulawayo, the city of her upbringing. She moved to the United States at 18 for further studies, eventually earning an MFA in creative writing at Cornell University.

The story Hitting Budapest, published in late 2010 in the Boston Review, follows a group of children from a shantytown called Paradise who risk venturing into the affluent neighbourhood nicknamed “Budapest” to steal guavas. Through their eyes Bulawayo explores the stark inequalities between the poor and the wealthy, and how hunger, desperation, and dreams push young lives into morally ambiguous, dangerous territory. In 2011, this story won the £10,000 Caine Prize for its moral power, vivid narrative, and refusal to simplify the violence or injustice it portrays.

Hitting Budapest later became the opening chapter of Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names (2013). That book continues many of the same themes: the devastation of social collapse in Zimbabwe, children growing up amid crisis, and the difficult, often painful journey of migrants. The novel splits its setting between Darling, a young girl in Zimbabwe, and her later life in the United States, where she joins an aunt. It shows how migration isn’t just escape it is dislocation, tension, identity struggles, and a confrontation with both loss and hope.

Her second novel, Glory (2022), shifts focus into political satire, inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It imagines a fictional country on the brink of revolution and authoritarian collapse, a reflection on power, corruption, and what happens when political systems that promise change betray ordinary people. While not explicitly about migration in the same way as We Need New Names, Glory shares Bulawayo’s concerns with displacement this time internal and the way oppressive regimes force people to consider where they belong.

Immigration struggles moving from one country to another, adjusting to new cultures, the longing for home are central to Bulawayo’s writing. We Need New Names deals directly with physical migration, with the sense of being sus­pended between two worlds, neither fully belonging nor fully severed from the homeland. Bulawayo has spoken about how her own migration to the U.S. as a young adult has shaped her sense of identity, of silence and voice, and how that tension plays out in her characters.

With the Best of Caine, Bulawayo is now being honoured not just for what she wrote in 2011, but for how that writing has continued to ripple outward into novels, into literary awards, into conversations about migration, inequality, polity, home and exile. It’s a reminder that stories of struggle, of crossing borders geographic or social still have urgency.