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 – Art And About Africa
AiW note: Art And About Africa is a free platform that allows its users to discover artists and art spaces in the vibrant African art scene on the continent, facilitating where to go, what to see, and who to engage… Read More ›
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Review: “You only need the mbira” – T.L. Huchu’s ‘The Library of the Dead’
AiW Guest: Ranka Primorac. By the time I twigged that T. L. Huchu’s The Library of the Dead was not aimed at my age group, it was no longer an option to stop reading. The author of the deft appropriation… Read More ›
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Q&A: Words on the Times – Marina Novelli on “Building Bridges through Contemporary Arts”
The Building Bridges through Contemporary Arts Online Panel Discussions Series is part of a University of Brighton initiative that facilitates a contemporary art-based dialogue between key stakeholders from Africa and Europe. Based on participants’ personal and professional local and global… Read More ›
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Q&A: Words on the Times – Open Hearts Big Dreams & Ready Set Go Books
AiW note: Open Hearts Big Dreams (OHBD) is a not-for-profit organisation working to provide literacy resources and opportunities for students in Ethiopia. Their main project is Ready Set Go Books, an innovative effort to increase literacy in Ethiopia. OHBD publishes… Read More ›
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Q&A with poet Romeo Oriogun: Sacrament of Bodies
AiW Guests: Fisayo Amodu, Dora Houghton & Bryony Gooch. Romeo Oriogun is an award-winning poet from Nigeria. His previous work includes the chapbooks Burnt Men, The Origin of Butterflies and Museum of Silence. He was also awarded the 2017 Brunel… Read More ›
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Review: Can We Really Decolonize the American University? – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o at the University of Yale, 2021.
AiW Guest: Kadiatou Keita. It was exhilarating at first. I cheered Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on like he was performing. The March 2021 installment of the University of Yale’s English Department organised ‘African Writers in Conversation Series‘ featured Ngũgĩ wa… Read More ›
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Q&A with Abubakar Adam Ibrahim: “Writing the history of the present”
AiW Guests: Yasmine Arasteh, Skye Frewin & Sally Wright. Abubakar Adam Ibrahim is a prominent Nigerian writer and journalist. He is the author of the short story collection The Whispering Trees (2012), the novel Season of Crimson Blossoms (2015), and… Read More ›
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Q&A: Words on the Times – Teesa Bahana of 32° East I Ugandan Arts Trust
AiW note: Following Lizzy Attree’s Words on the Times, in which she spoke about teaching and fundraising during a pandemic; Dami Ajayi’s responses to the same Q&A, in which he discussed his experiences of working as a doctor and writer… Read More ›
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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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