An international judging panel, meeting in Kampala, Uganda, awarded the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book Award to Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe (University Of Massachusetts Press). The author won £1,000. Regional winners now enter the final stage of the 20th Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the international award for outstanding fiction, which will be decided by a panel made up of the four regional Chairpersons in Melbourne and announced in March 2006. They join other regional winners from Canada and the Caribbean; Eurasia; and South East Asia and the South Pacific.  £10,000 will be awarded to the author of Overall Best Book, and £3,000 to the author of Best First Book. Doreen Baingana is a Ugandan writer who lives in the United States.  Her collection, Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe, won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Award in Short Fiction.  Ms. Baingana has also won the Washington Independent Writers Fiction Prize and was a two-time finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing, in 2004 and 2005.   She was a Writer-in-Residence at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2005.  She received her MFA degree from the University of Maryland and a law degree from Makerere University, Uganda.