Maggie Davey T he first Caine Prize for African Literature has been awarded to Leila Aboulela for her story The Museum, which appears in the Heinemann collection Opening Spaces: An Anthology of Contemporary African Women’s Writing, edited by the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera. One of Aboulela’s strengths, mentioned by the judging panel and borne out in her first novel The Translator, is an ability to record the cost of cross-cultural encounters from all sides with astonishing intimacy. The daughter of an Egyptian woman mathematician and a Sudanese father, Aboulela left Khartoum in the late 1980s to study statistics at the London School of Economics in London. Following that, she moved to the University of Aberdeen to teach. The jingoism of the 1990 Gulf War bred anti-Arab feeling in Britain, and Aboulela felt compelled to respond to the gung-ho rhetoric by writing articles for local newspapers. It was then that she took an evening course in writing at the university. This led to a course in creative writing taught by the American writer Todd McEwan. This type of writing allowed Aboulela to explore the other dimensions of cross-cultural alarm in a way that reporting for a newspaper couldn’t. Reading The Museum, one is struck by the force and range of references to the eyes. “I would close my eyes trying to escape from my face …” Not Aboulela, but Nawal El Saadawi, from her autobiography. And The Museum is full of the traditional face-offs and disputes associated with gender, class and Islam that El Saadawi writes of. Aboulela is not shy to reveal her own prejudices. Ultimately, though, her Islam has allowed her to experiment with language and feeling in a radical style. Unlike many women’s experience, Aboulela saw her mother not at manual or traditionally “nurturing” work, but daily sitting at her desk involved in mathematical abstraction. Added to this, was Leila’s inability to grasp any kind of mathematical concept – potentially distancing her from her mother’s world. Her mother was, however, a pioneer when it came to mental blocks. She incorporated mathematical concepts into her daughter’s physical world and encouraged her to believe that it was possible to move from a state of complete bewilderment to a state of enlightenment – a belief that has allowed Aboulela to switch from the language of mathematics to the language of fiction, and from Sudanese-accented Arabic to Scottish- accented English, not without effort, but with certain grace. The Translator is published by Polygon in Edinburgh. The Caine Prize was set up in honour of the late Sir Michael Caine, instigator of the Booker Prize in Britain and the Smirnoff Booker Prize in Russia. Ben Okri was chairman of the panel of judges.