AiW Guest Nyana Kakoma When upcoming writers like me hear that Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi started writing Kintu in 2003, we despair. We reach into that part of our brain that always doubts that we will make it at this writing… Read More ›
Reviews & Spotlights on…
Between Imagination and Madness: Matière grise (2011) – review
AiW Guest Catherine Gilbert Matière grise (Grey Matter), 2011. Directed by Kivu Ruhorahoza. 110 min. Kinyarwanda and French with English subtitles. 2014 marks the twentieth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda in which as many as one million people were… Read More ›
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s ‘Weep Not, Child’ – 50 Years On
AiW Guest Sarah Jilani This year marks the 50th anniversary of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child. When the novel was originally published in 1964 by Heinemann’s African Writers Series, its author James Ngugi was a young Kenyan student at… Read More ›
“Out in Africa: Same-sex desire in sub saharan literatures and cultures” by Chantal Zabus (Review)
Mama still reminds me every once in a while that there are penalties in Nigeria for that sort of thing. And of course, she’s right. I’ve read of them in the newspapers and have heard of them on the… Read More ›
Floating on the Southbank with Mulatu Astatke: Review, Africa Utopia
AiW Guest Lennon Chido Mhishi By the time the music has started playing, I am excited inside already. For a moment my mind is lost somewhere, and I only realise then that there was a solo on the piano, but… Read More ›
Review: Alex Smith’s ‘Devilskein & Dearlove’
‘AiW Guest Kristen Roupenian’ If it has been a long time since you’ve read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden—and if, in the meantime, your memory has been clouded by a series of overly charming movie adaptations—you may… Read More ›
Books for the Masses? Publishing Genre Fiction in Africa: Africa Writes, 13 July 2014
AiW Guest Emma Shercliff Review of panel discussion with Bibi Bakare-Yusuf of Cassava Republic Press; Valerie Brandes of Jacaranda Books; Verna Wilkins of Tamarind Books and Susan Yearwood, agent and founder of Susan Yearwood Literary Agency. Chaired by Simi Dosekun…. Read More ›
Ama Ata Aidoo in Conversation: Review, Africa Writes
AiW Guest Réhab Abdelghany Last month, the Royal African Society’s annual Africa Writes Festival brought to the UK an audience with the eminent Ghanaian playwright, poet, novelist and academic, Ama Ata Aidoo: a festive event in its own right. Having… Read More ›
‘Beyond the Novel: Developing Contemporary African Writing’: Review, Africa Writes 2014
Saturday 12th July found me seated in the conference auditorium of the British Library, expectantly awaiting the start of a panel entitled ‘Beyond the Novel: Developing Contemporary African Writing’. Comprising one of the many events scheduled at Africa Writes 2014,… Read More ›
The Story Club: Malawi’s Newest Literary Initiative Goes Off-line
Today, more and more literary events happen online. Readers argue over the plotlines of serialized ‘Facebook fiction.’ Writers tweet entire novels. And a Google Hangout with an author will draw a larger crowd than a signing at a local bookstore…. Read More ›
Portraiture & Photography in Africa
Peffer and Cameron’s new edited collection brings together disparate accounts of photography in Africa, revising and developing what is, as they point out, still a relatively new field, despite the work of (for example) Paul Jenkins and Paul Landau that… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Efemia Chela’s ‘Chicken’
AiW Guest Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed Efemia Chela’s ‘Chicken’ initially felt like two different stories told in three parts. This was until I gave it another read and realised its three separate parts tell an interesting coming-of-age story. Our narrator, Kaba, is at… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Tendai Huchu’s ‘The Intervention’
AiW Guest Anthea Gordon In Binyavanga Wainana’s influential essay ‘How to Write About Africa’, one of his many salient pieces of tongue-in-cheek advice is: ‘be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa… Read More ›
News: A. Gofer wins the inaugural International Proofreader’s Derby (from Ivan Vladislavic’s ‘The Restless Supermarket’)
NEWS (no longer quite breaking): A. Gofer (c/o Steph Newell) has won the inaugural International Aubrey Tearle Proofreader’s Derby (fittingly restlessly re-named from the 2014 Restless Derby). The neck-and-neck runners up are Catharine Morris aka Words and Things, and Kai… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Okwiri Oduor’s ‘My Father’s Head’
AiW Guest: Doseline Kiguru As I began to read ‘My Father’s Head’, I thought for a moment that it was going to be yet another Caine Prize story set in church and about cunning priests and their gullible as well as… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Diane Awerbuck’s ‘Phosphorescence’
A story about waste – human waste – in immaculate prose, Diane Awerbuck’s ‘Phosphorescence’ has, for me, a quality of suspension. On the one hand, it’s about the defiant resistance of ‘an old lady’ against loss, of her habitual daily… Read More ›
Sarah Lotz on Her New Global Thriller, ‘The Three’
Walking into Vroman’s—an independent bookstore in Pasadena, California, a place I’ve been coming since I was a kid—I was shocked to see Sarah Lotz’s name written neatly in red marker on the whiteboard announcing author talks. I’d just come back… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Billy Kahora’s ‘The Gorilla’s Apprentice’
A note of intro. from Africa in Words: Last year we took part in ‘Blogging the Caine Prize’ – a carnival of week-by-week blogging around the shortlist for the annual Caine Prize for African writing. While there is no ‘organised’ carnival… Read More ›
Making lists: Africa39
List culture has become as ‘ubiquitous’ a feature of contemporary cultural life as the prize culture James English writes about in his seminal The Economy of Prestige. Lists from The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 to Granta’s Best Young British… Read More ›
Book Review: Teju Cole’s ‘Every Day Is for the Thief’
AiW Guest Kristen Roupenian The back matter of Teju Cole’s novel Every Day Is for the Thief refers to an ‘unnamed narrator’, but if this is not meant to be the same character as Julius, our guide through 2011’s Open City, then Cole… Read More ›
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