Author Archives
A series of Guest Author posts that open our conversations.
For more info, bios and links about each of our AiW Guests, scroll to the foot of their individual posts.
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Q&A: Words on the Times – Nduka Otiono
AiW Guest: Nduka Otiono, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada AiW note: Yesterday we celebrated the African release of Wreaths for a Wayfarer (Narrative Landscape Press), published in honour of writer, academic, and esteemed beloved mentor and Nigerian public intellectual, Pius Adesanmi, who lost… Read More ›
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Celebrating World Poetry Day with readings from Wreaths for A Wayfarer
AiW Guests: Nduka Otiono and Uche Peter Umezurike. AiW note: by way of introduction to our Guest post here, we are very pleased to be able to share with the editors news of the African release of Wreaths for a… Read More ›
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“We can draw from the past and create something new, or we can just present the past as it was”: Talking Nostalgia, Memory, and Creative Collaboration with Wanjeri Gakuru
AiW Guests: Isobella Norman, Leyla Mohammed and Leoni Fretwell. Wanjeri Gakuru is a freelance journalist, essayist and filmmaker invested in gender equality and social justice. From 2018, Wanjeri has been the Managing Editor of Jalada Africa, a Pan-African writers’ collective… Read More ›
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Review: A Reckoning with East Africa’s Colonial Histories – Abdulrazak Gurnah’s ‘Afterlives’
AiW Guest: Florian Stadtler.
German colonial history remains little explored in fiction. Since the 1880s, Kaiser Wilhelm II, grandson of Queen Victoria, had the ambition to secure what was then termed Germany’s ‘Platz and der Sonne’, its place in the sun, Von Bülow’s infamous phrase in praise of Germany’s expansionist colonial policies. In popular historical discourse of German colonialism, attention tends to focus more on Deutsch-Südwestafrika…
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Q&A with Abdulrazak Gurnah about latest novel ‘Afterlives’: “These stories have been with me all along…”
By AiW Guest: Judyannet Muchiri.
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Judyannet Muchiri: This is a heavy story and yet there are moments of stillness, joy, love, and tenderness, if you will. I wonder how it is for you as a writer to capture this human existence in its totality as you have done in Afterlives.Abdulrazak Gurnah: My interest was not to write about the war or the ugliness of colonialism. Instead I want to make sure the context in which war and colonialism happened is understood. And that the people in that context were people with entire existences. I want to show how people who are wounded by the war and by life itself cope in these circumstances. Using the unexpected kindnesses in the story, I wanted to show that there is potential for kindness in people and sometimes circumstances can draw such kindness from us.
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“Such noise and screams and blood”: A Review of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s ‘Afterlives’ (2020)
By AiW Guest: Judyannet Muchiri.
In the wake of a bad dream, one of the protagonists in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives, Hamza, laments: “such noise and screams and blood”. These words keep resounding when one thinks about the disruption caused by colonialism in Africa – how our grandparents and ancestors must have felt with the arrival of those who set themselves up as colonial masters.
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Tasting Feelings: A Review of Iquo DianaAbasi’s ‘Efo Riro’
AiW Guest: Tọ́pẹ́-ẸniỌbańkẹ́ Adégòkè. Iquo DianaAbasi’s debut collection of short stories, Efo Riro (Parresia 2020), puts meat on the bones of the observation that the sense of taste is somehow wired to things that we find delightful or repulsive. Consider psychiatry where… Read More ›
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Q&A with Femi Kayode, author of ‘Lightseekers’
AiW Guest: Tọ́pẹ́-ẸniỌbańkẹ́ Adégòkè. AiW note: Femi Kayode grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. He studied Clinical Psychology at the University of Ibadan and has worked in advertising over the last two decades. He was a Packard Fellow in Film and… Read More ›
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Q&A with Writer and Publisher Nii Ayikwei Parkes: ‘The thing about any book, anything that’s written, is that it’s the start of a conversation, it’s never the end’
AiW Guests: Lottie McGrath, Charlie Renwick, Eloise Percy-Davis and Tilly Everard. Nii Ayikwei Parkes is an acclaimed British-Ghanaian poet, writer, and publisher. Winner of multiple international awards, Parkes’ work ranges from the reinvention of accounts of slavery with sci-fi undertones… Read More ›
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Q&A with Ayesha Harruna Attah: ‘The Deep Blue Between’
AiW Guests: Trang Vu, Hannah Judge & Naomi Osborne. Ayesha Harruna Attah is a Senegal-based Ghanaian writer. She is the author of Harmattan Rain, Saturday’s Shadows and The Hundred Wells of Salaga and has recently published a young adult novel,… Read More ›
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Q&A: Words on the Times – Dami Ajayi
“Here are stories that are true … because they are windows that open into our contemporary African existence” (Editors’ Introduction, Limbe to Lagos, p. xi).” AiW note: Last week we published a review by Kwame Osei-Poku: A Sense of Africa… Read More ›
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Q&A: Words on the Times – Lizzy Attree
AiW note: Earlier this week we published Lizzy Attrees’s review of They Called You Dambudzo: A Memoir by Flora Veit-Wild (2021, Jacana Media). At the book’s centre is the double heartbeat of Veit-Wild’s relationship with the late Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo… Read More ›
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Q&A: Words on the Times – Tinashe Mushakavanhu
Ahead of Jacana Media’s launch of “They Called You Dambudzo: A Memoir” by Flora Veit-Wild, we are fully pleased to be able to share Mushakavanhu’s Words on the Times – an AiW Q&A series initiated as the early stages of the pandemic set in to connect us and our changing experiences of work and working.
Not only has Tinashe researched and written on Marechera extensively, and in a number of generative and connective ways and contexts, we are also delighted to be able to introduce Tinashe as a collaborator with us and member of our team here at AiW with these, his Words…
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Review: ‘They Called You Dambudzo: A Memoir’ by Flora Veit-Wild
AiW Guest: Lizzy Attree. Flora Veit-Wild presents this compelling book as a memoir, and it does contain some personal details of her early life in Germany which supplement and enrich the portrayal of her love affair with the Zimbabwean writer… Read More ›
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Q&A: Words on the Times – Kwame Osei-Poku
AiW note: Earlier this week we published Kwame Osei-Poku’s review of Limbe to Lagos: Nonfiction From Cameroon and Nigeria (2020, The Mantle). Compiled by Dami Ajayi, Dzekashu MacViban, and Emmanuel Iduma, Limbe to Lagos is an edited collection of non-fiction… Read More ›
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A Sense of Africa in The Exploration of Reminiscences: A Review of Limbe to Lagos: Nonfiction From Cameroon and Nigeria
AiW Guest: Kwame Osei-Poku (Ph.D.), University of Ghana. When a collection of stories succeeds in making its readers identify with and care about real issues, triggering sensations of empathy and reinforcing readers’ own reminiscences, we realise the powerful impact of… Read More ›
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Got my hair, got my head: A review of Living While Feminist: Our Bodies, Our Truths
AiW Guest: Thulani Angoma-Mzini There is a silence, or perhaps a deafness, that the lay man (and particularly the cis-gendered heterosexual man) indulges in when it comes to bodies gendered differently to theirs. The collection of essays titled Living While… Read More ›
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Q&A: Words on the Times – Elma Shaw of Cotton Tree Press
AiW note: To celebrate the past thirty years of independent distributing and bookselling at African Books Collective (ABC), we are running a series highlighting the wonderful work of those who make up ABC. We will be talking to some of… Read More ›
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Review: Billy Kahora’s The Cape Cod Bicycle War and Other Stories (1)
AiW Guest: Ofonime Inyang. AiW note: This week, we bring you two reviews of Billy Kahora’s short story collection, The Cape Cod Bicycle Wars and Other Stories – originally published by Huza Press (Kigali) in 2019 and made available in the US… Read More ›
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Q&A: Words on the Times – Irene Staunton of Weaver Press
AiW note: To celebrate the past thirty years of independent distributing and bookselling at African Books Collective (ABC), we are running a series highlighting the wonderful work of those who make up ABC. We will be talking to some of… Read More ›
