After many weeks of reviewing the excellent stories, poems, and essays published here at Isele Magazine, we revealed the category longlists in April and the category shortlists in May. Finally, we are thrilled to announce winners of the 2025 Isele Prizes.

Meet them:

Josiah Ikpe Wins the Isele Short Story Prize for “Not Like Other Boys”

Josiah Ikpe’s “Not Like Other Boys” tackles a serious subject matter with the directness and delicateness only language has the power to evoke. Ikpe’s sentences are tactfully varied in length. And as you read, you feel the weight and depth of the emotions he has aimed for, the seamless way he peels the story down to bare bones to reveal meanings that are emotionally and cultural resonant. This story asks what it means to endure cruelty and to prevail despite it. The humor here is timely and necessary; instead of despair typical of stories that explore such subject matter, we find laughter, we find brilliance, and we find an observant narrator whose world is rocked in the best way possible when our protagonist triumphs at the end.

Read “Not Like Other Boys” by Josiah Ikpe.

Tolu Daniel Wins the Isele Nonfiction Prize for “Notes of a Nonresident Alien”

Tolu Daniel’s “Notes of a Nonresident Alien” is a haunting chronicle of life abroad. It is rendered in colors so vivid and in a language so wrenching that we feel the pulse of each sentence, the thrum of each numbered vignette. This essay asks what it means to survive in a place where cruelty to international persons and immigrants has become the street jingle. Our narrator constantly looks back to the home they left behind, remembering it, longing for it. It is clear that they would not have left had home not become what Warsan Shire calls “the mouth of a shark.” While this essay contributes to the broader conversation on immigration, it is also about love, about community, and longing. Ultimately, it is about stretching out one’s hand and reaching for an anchor, lest they get swept away by the cruelties of the time.

Read “Notes of a Nonresident Alien” by Tolu Daniel.

Fatima Abdullahi Wins the Isele Poetry Prize for “Three Poems”

Fatima Abdullahi’s poems contain profound emotion and lyrical precision, rendering personal grief as a collective experience. Each piece in the trio explores loss from different angles—ageing, the death of a father, and emotional detachment in mourning—with imagery that is tender, raw, and hauntingly memorable. The poems are remarkable not only for their technical control and intertextual references (from Dylan Thomas to Diana Der-Hovanessian), but also for their ability to collapse vast emotional landscapes into intimate, carefully wrought lines. Abdullahi’s voice is clear-eyed and compassionate, making space for silences, shadows, and the unspoken ways grief reshapes us. The work asks us to sit with our own losses and reconsider what it means to remember.

Read “Three Poems” by Fatima Abdullahi.

Congratulations to them all!