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: Uche Peter Umez interviews poet Efe Paul Azino
AiW Guest: Uche Peter Umez Widely regarded as one of Nigeria’s leading performance poets, Efe Paul Azino has been a headliner at many of the nation’s premier poetry venues. He is the Director of the Lagos International Poetry Festival,… Read More ›
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Review: Ebola ’76 by Amir Tag-Elsir
AiW Guest: Réhab Abdelghany Ebola ’76 is a short novel by acclaimed Sudanese writer Amir Tag-Elsir, whose The Grub Hunter (2010) was short-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2011 and long-listed for the Arab Booker. Published originally… Read More ›
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Fiction Writing Workshop with Taiye Selasi, Nnedi Okorafor and Helon Habila: Ake Arts & Book Festival, Review
Africa in Words Guest: Socrates Mbamalu Now in its third year, the Aké Arts and Book Festival is perhaps not only the largest and best organised gathering of African writers on the continent, but also the most representative of significant debates… Read More ›
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Borderless Words: The Lagos International Poetry Festival 2015
AiW Guest: Iquo DianaAbasi The Lagos International Poetry Festival 2015 was themed ‘Borderless Words’, aptly so in this period of migrations within Africa and across Europe. The organizers say that in the light of border restrictions, they choose to see… Read More ›
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Review: Lara Pawson’s ‘In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre’
AiW Guest: John Spall. English language books on Angola aren’t published very often, or indeed, many books at all written by non-Angolans. Despite Angola’s civil war ending over 13 years ago, comparatively few researchers visit Angola due to the various… Read More ›
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At Prestigious Yale Literary Festival, Africanness Affirmed: Ifeanyi Awachie on the Windham Campbell Festival
AiW Guest: Ifeanyi Awachie As a Nigerian-American undergraduate at Yale, I was both impressed by my university’s grandeur and accustomed not to expect the institution’s most illustrious visitors or highly touted programs to reflect my race or cultural identity. The… Read More ›
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Losing my Head Because: Ben Okri’s Meditations on Greatness
AiW Guest Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire I thought that Ben Okri’s December 2014 infamous Guardian essay in which he berated African and black writers for suffering under a mental tyranny of subject was too prescriptive and an inaccurate reading of contemporary African… Read More ›
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Review: Lusaka Punk and Other Stories – the Caine Prize Anthology 2015
AiW Guest: Madhu Krishnan In the just sixteen years that it has existed, the Caine Prize for African Writing has made an indelible mark, if not on African literature itself, then certainly on the critical discourses which surround it. With… Read More ›
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Facing Forward: Africa Utopia, Review
AiW Guest Steve Haines Sunday’s panel session Facing Forward was introduced by the chair, festival curator Hannah Pool, as bringing together the many strands of Africa Utopia and giving an opportunity for speakers from diverse disciplines to reflect on the… Read More ›
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Crossing Borders to Find Home – new non-fiction by Pede Hollist
By AiW Guest: Pede Hollist AiW note: Pede Hollist is the author of the novel So the Path Does Not Die (recently reviewed by Rashi Rohatgi for AiW) and the Caine Prize shortlisted story ‘Foreign Aid‘. Speaking at the Africa Writes festival… Read More ›
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Review: Binders Full of Story-telling Women – Pede Hollist’s ‘So the Path Does Not Die’
By AiW Guest Rashi Rohatgi. So the Path Does Not Die (Jacaranda Press, 2014), the African Literature Association’s Book of the Year by Caine Prize 2013 shortlisted author Pede Hollist, promises to be an ‘issues’ book: its protagonist, Finaba, loses her… Read More ›
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A Question of Power: Ben Okri’s “Meditations on Greatness” at Africa Writes
AiW Guest Réhab Abdelghany I first saw Ben Okri in a photograph that the Africa Centre had sent me back in 2000 to accompany an interview with the first Caine Prize winner, Leila Aboulela, which I published later in Egypt. In… Read More ›
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Acts of mutiny: the Caine Prize and ‘African Literature’
By AiW Guest Ranka Primorac. In London, a three-day literary festival called Africa Writes took place recently at the British Library (BL). The festival is now in its fourth year, it hosts an ever-widening stream of writers, readers and publishers,… Read More ›
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Review: Nadia Davids’ ‘An Imperfect Blessing’ (Umuzi, 2014)
AiW Guest: Ed Charlton. In the same way as the vicissitudes of the weather—sudden hailstorms, raucous gales, sweltering humidity—often mark our experience of a place more vividly than any of the customary variations in climate, it is the petty familial… Read More ›
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Q&A with Malawian Writer Ekari Mbvundula
AiW Guest Joanna Woods Living in Blantyre, Malawi, Ekari Mbvundula is a budding freelance writer whose talent is one to watch. Her work crosses literary genres, but she has a keen interest in science fiction. Her story ‘Montague’s Last’ has… Read More ›
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Q&A: S.J. Naudé in conversation with Carli Coetzee
By AiW Guests: S.J. Naudé and Carli Coetzee. AiW note: S.J. Naudé was born in South Africa and studied at Cambridge University and Columbia University. After practising law in New York and London for many years, he returned to South Africa for… Read More ›
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Review: SJ Naudé, ‘The Alphabet of Birds’.
By AiW Guest: Carli Coetzee. AiW note: this review is accompanied by a Q&A between Carli Coetzee and S J Naudé here. S J Naudé’s collection of short stories appeared in an Afrikaans language version (Alfabet van die Voëls, Umuzi) in 2011,… Read More ›
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Blogging the Caine Prize: Elnathan John’s ‘Flying’
AiW Guest Madhu Krishnan Elnathan John’s ‘Flying’ opens with a dream and ends with a limping chicken. If that sentence sounds incongruous, it, like the story itself, is deliberately so. Throughout its course, ‘Flying’ – at only just over 4200… Read More ›
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Blogging the Caine Prize: Segun Afolabi’s ‘The Folded Leaf’
AiW Guest: John Uwa In reviewing Segun Afolabi’s ‘The Folded Leaf’, a short story shortlisted for Caine Prize 2015, one must resist the temptation to mounting up praises on the text. It is certainly a well-articulated and thematically focused text; and… Read More ›
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Blogging the Caine Prize: F.T. Kola’s ‘A Party for the Colonel’
AiW Guest: Doseline Kiguru Writing in 2000, only six years after the end of apartheid, Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael in Senses of Culture decried that South African cultural and literary imaginings have been based mainly on the following frames:… Read More ›
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