A week in books: Caine Prize for African Writing, Books on the Web

Last week, during a sultry evening under the fan vault of the old Bodleian Library in Oxford, a little piece of literary history was made. In this ancient temple of print, an international award went to a new piece of fiction that came to light without the traditional intercession of ink, glue or paper. Binyavanga Wainaina, born in Kenya but based in South Africa, won the Caine Prize for African Writing (worth $15,000) for his story Discovering Home. It first appeared not between the carbon-based covers of any print anthology or journal, but in the e-zine G21: the world's magazine, which you can find at www.g21.net/.

Founded in memory of the late Booker plc chairman Sir Michael Caine, a long-standing friend of Africa, the prize deliberately focuses on short stories. In a continent still often dominated by the lists of overseas publishers (such as Macmillan and OUP), it makes sound sense to reach fresh talent through the briefer fictional forms. Last year's winner, Helon Habila from Nigeria, swiftly signed a two-book deal with Penguin. His début novel, Waiting for an Angel, is due this November from Hamish Hamilton.

As this Caine victory attests, internet publication can clear global channels for newcomers, whatever their location – provided that someone notices their work. It would, all the same, be rather misleading to present Binyavanga Wainaina as some isolated village griot who casually happened on a laptop. He writes about food and travel for many South African magazines, collects African recipes from across the continent (13,000 so far), and runs his own catering consultancy, Amuka Investments. Anywhere on earth, the wired world tends to favour those who have already perfected their own recipe for success.

Time was, not long ago, when major publishers as well as e-zine enthusiasts nurtured hopes for original fiction on the net. In those Utopian days, at the close of the 20th century, corporate lips smacked at the idea. Then interest plummeted as fast as the Nasdaq index of tech stocks.

As far as digital-economy disasters went, this one wasn't so much a dot.bomb as the faintest of dot.pops. For ordinary readers, the most visible sign of a busted pipe-dream came in the lanky and (normally) lucrative form of Stephen King. The Maine mega-seller discovered that the world-wide tribe of fans that hangs on his every creepy word proved tardy about buying subscriptions to his online serial, The Plant. If Big Steve couldn't turn an honest dollar on the web, who could? In fact, and contrary to myth, The Plant did moderately well. Yet the experiment was deemed a failure at the moment (autumn 2000) when e-commerce began to look as wholesome as necrophilia. King himself pointed out that his yarn about a "voracious supernatural vine", which promises publishers huge riches in exchange for flesh and blood, was meant as a satire on the media moguls' greedy expectations of the net.

Quietly, big publishers reverted to the Amazon model. Now their websites operate chiefly as shop windows and sales points. The only change likely to modify this pattern soon will be the emergence of vast digital databases that allow customers to taste, and order, single copies of hard-to-find titles. Old or rare works will, with luck, never go out of print – because they won't exactly be in print at all.

Meanwhile, e-zines such as G21 keep aloft the tattered banner of original digital fiction. Another quality-assured location is www.richmondreview.co.uk, the first and still the finest of British-edited online literary journals. Prize juries (especially for stories) should delegate some happy surfer to keep an eye on such intrepid ventures. Where Africa leads, the rest of the planet can still follow.