AiW Guest: Jovia Salifu This month, Jovia Salifu continues our deep dive into Eight New Generation African Poets. As a lover of poetry, it is always a wonderful feeling to come across beautiful poetry. It is even more exciting when… Read More ›
Reviews & Spotlights on…
Living in and through Zambia: Review of Tanvi Bush’s ‘Witch Girl’ (Modjaji Books)
AiW Guest: Gráinne O’Connell Witch Girl is a 2015 novel that reads like a play. Indeed, I hope to see more titles by this author, including plays. The title of the book, Witch Girl, reflects in part that the protagonist… Read More ›
Review: Moses Tladi UNEARTHED, South African National Gallery, 24 September 2015 – 31 March 2016
AiW Guest: Anthea Gordon To get to the South African National Art Gallery (SANG) you walk through the Company Gardens in Cape Town’s city centre. After passing baobab trees, a rose garden, and fountains in the middle of green lawns,… Read More ›
Future Visions: Five Breakout Talents in African Film Today
AiW Guest: Sarah Jilani Returning to screens across London this past November, the Royal African Society’s annual Film Africa festival celebrated and promoted filmmaking from various countries across the continent. In a colourful week of reunions, fresh faces and thought-provoking… Read More ›
Memory and the Cartography of Dismembered Parts: A Review of Peter Akinlabi’s A Pagan Place
AiW Guest: Iquo DianaAbasi Eke. This month, AiW Guest, poet Iquo DianaAbasi Eke, continues our deep dive in The Eight New Generation African Poets with her review of Peter Akinlabi’s A Pagan Place. In this collection, Akinlabi comes across as an… Read More ›
Review: Ivan Vladislavić’s 101 Detectives
AiW Guest: Thando Njovane. As demonstrated by his substantial and sophisticated body of work, South Africa’s Ivan Vladislavić is certainly one of the most remarkable and versatile writers of our time. Vladislavić’s latest gift to letters is the insightful, elaborate,… Read More ›
Home is now; home is never, now you see it, now you don’t: A Review of ‘From Home and Exile’ by Joanna Woods
AiW Guest Shadreck Chikoti A few months ago we laid to rest Professor Steve Chimombo, one of the leading writers from Malawi, a man of exceptional talent, unwavering in his passion for the arts. His legendary life has been chronicled… Read More ›
Review: Kholofelo Maenetsha’s ‘To the Black Women We All Knew’
AiW Guest: Helen Cousins. What a bittersweet eulogy this is to the suffering of Black women at the hands (and often the fists) of Black men; not always surviving, as indicated by the past tense of the title. The novel… Read More ›
I Am Not Done with African Immigrant Literature
AiW Guest Shadreck Chikoti I get afraid, very afraid, when somebody, anybody, prescribes to me which books to read and not to read. When somebody gives me a template of what African literature ought to look like. And boy! You… Read More ›
Reading Lessons: The Chronic (“New Cartographies,” March 2015)
AiW Guest: Ed Charlton. When it comes to alliances and accords, Africa is full of them. Whether it is bilateral extradition treaties, regional trade agreements, or the pan-continental constitution of the African Union, there are everywhere traces of the extranational… Read More ›
Ẹ jẹ́ k’á sọ Yorùbá: Yoruba language resources online
The online space offers important opportunities to develop resources for African-language documentation and learning, whether drawing on the power of apps and online games to make language learning fun, or on social media, online databases and crowdsourcing as tools to… Read More ›
Review: Bearing Heavy Things by Liyou Libsekal
This month, Guest Reviewer Rehaana Manek continues our deep dive into the Eight New Generation African Poets. Libsekal writes as though she has witnessed. Witnessed violence, witnessed empathy, witnessed intimacy and has witnessed the bearing of heavy things. Chris Abani,… Read More ›
Review: ‘Do Not Go Gentle’
AiW Guest: Danielle Faye Tran. “It is my wish […] that people should know I died of AIDS” (27) -from a letter written by character Zola to be read aloud at her vigil The spread of HIV creates a tense… Read More ›
A Curated New Generation: Review of ‘Eight New-Generation African Poets’
First: these chapbooks are beautiful. Even on an e-reader, sapped of gravitas, Ibibio artist Imo Nse Imeh’s cover art adds a Chagall-ian layer of both modernism and ethnic nostalgia to this box set, to which Peter Akinlabi, Viola Allo,… Read More ›
Africa in Words’ highlights of 2015
Africa in Words has been taking a break over the holiday season, but we couldn’t resist taking a look back over the memorable year that has been 2015. Here, some of our Editors reflect on their highlights of 2015. We’d… Read More ›
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 ›
Ethiopia in Transition at Film Africa 2015
AiW Guest: Mike Thomas Four years after Lindiwe Dovey and Namvula Rennie founded Film Africa in 2011, in association with the Royal African Society (RAS) and SOAS, the 2015 edition of the film festival offered the Ethiopia in Transition strand,… Read More ›
Review: poetry from Modjaji Books – ‘Now the World Takes These Breaths’ by Joan Metelerkamp and ‘The Attribute of Poetry’ by Elisa Galgut
AiW Guest: Tom Penfold. Now the World Takes These Breaths by Joan Metelerkamp Joan Metelerkamp is one of the most consistent and articulate poets of South Africa’s post-apartheid literary landscape. Alongside other contributors to the New Coin journal that she… Read More ›
Review: Giving Thanks – Natasha Soobramanien’s ‘Genie and Paul’
As a second-generation American, Thanksgiving seemed to me a less-accessible holiday than, say, Halloween: my grandparents weren’t always available and, frankly, turkey and football still both seem pointless. After leaving the country of my birth behind, though, I’ve started to… Read More ›
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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