AiW note: Bwesigye Bwa Mesigire’s reflections on Ben Okri’s headline event for the 2015 Africa Writes Festival form part of our #PastAndPresent weekend of re-posts of coverage of the festival over the years (from 2013-2018). The full timetable of our… Read More ›
african authors
2016 Africa Writes #P&P Highlight Reel – ‘On Being a Woman Writer: Nawal El Saadawi’
AiW Note: As part of our Africa Writes #PastAndPresent weekend, and in the absence of the in-person festival in 2020, this highlight reel marks the headline event at Africa Writes 2016, “On Being a Woman Writer: Nawal El Saadawi in… Read More ›
2013 Africa Writes #P&P – Q&A: Novelist, poet and literary scholar Mukoma wa Ngugi
AiW Note: As part of our Africa Writes #PastAndPresent weekend, in the absence of the in-person festival in 2020, this Q&A is the first in our cast back over our coverage of Africa Writes over the years, and is republished… Read More ›
Event: Time of the Writer Festival, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal (16–21 March)
23rd Time of the Writer Festival University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts (CCA) 16 – 21 March 2020 The University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts (CCA), in partnership with eThekwini Municipality, will host the 23rd Time of the Writer… Read More ›
Event: Ake Arts & Book Festival (25-28 October, Lagos)
Ake Arts & Book Festival is fast approaching! The sixth edition of the festival will take place for the first time in Lagos on October 25 – 28, 2018. The theme for this year is Fantastical Futures and events and conversations will… Read More ›
Call for Papers: African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture and Society, Special Issue (Deadline for Abstracts: 1 November 2018)
The Journal of Economics, Culture and Society invites you to submit abstracts on: Marxism and African Literatures: New Interventions. This special issue of African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture and Society will survey recent developments at the intersection of Marxist… Read More ›
Event: South African Book Fair 2018 (7th–9th September, Johannesburg)
Join, share and celebrate #OURSTORIES at the South African Book Fair 2018 Newtown Precinct, Johannesburg 7–9 September Meet experts from the book publishing industry ready to assist with learning, teaching support materials, of the best research from university presses, plus… Read More ›
Event: Open Book Festival, Cape Town (5th-9th September)
Join the Book Lounge & the Fugard Theatre Open Book Festival Cape Town, South Africa 5 – 9 September 2018 Open Book Festival at The Fugard Theatre is an annual literary festival in Cape Town, South Africa, the first of which… Read More ›
Archiving Small Magazines: AWA Digitisation and Exhibition in Montpelier
AiW Guest Aurélie Journo AiW note: This Guest post is part of a series of articles publishing on Africa in Words that come out of conversations between a new interdisciplinary network of researchers and literary producers examining the circulation and production… Read More ›
Telling the African Story: A Review of Janet Kofi-Tsekpo’s Yellow Iris
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Q&A: Namwali Serpell
Shortly before Namwali Serpell became the sixteenth winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, I had the chance to ask her a couple of questions about reading her winning story ‘The Sack’ and its many modes of uncertainty. This Q&A forms part… Read More ›
Q&A: Masande Ntshanga
Posted in the run up to our review of the Caine Prize 2015 anthology Lusaka Punk and Other Stories, as part of a follow up series to our 2015 Blogging the Caine Prize – open to the ongoing public conversation the prize, and… Read More ›