The Library at Willesden Green invites you to a conversation with the Caine Prize for African Writing 2018 shortlist On Thursday 28th June 2018 From 6.30pm The Caine Prize for African Writing is a literature prize awarded to an African… Read More ›
Caine Prize
South African author, Henrietta Rose-Innes, on cityscapes, self-contained stories, and Cape Town
AiW Guest: Sana Goyal Edited excerpts from the Conversations in Bloomsbury event (March 10, 2017), held at SOAS, London, and which hosted Henrietta Rose-Innes and Brian Chikwava. When Brian Chikwava and Henrietta Rose-Innes found themselves at SOAS for a… Read More ›
Caine Prize 2016: “Memories We Lost”—The Text, Its Readers and the World, a review by Pede Hollist
AiW Guest Pede Hollist The biography at the end of “Memories We Lost” quotes South African writer, filmmaker, and photographer Lidudumalingani as saying, “I am fascinated by mental illnesses, having seen my own extended relatives deal with it.” He also… Read More ›
The Truth outside Context: Jumoke Verissimo reviews Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday
This review of Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday is the first in a series of reviews of books published by Cassava Republic Press that we’ll be running over coming weeks to celebrate the launch of Cassava Republic in the UK. AiW… 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: Pede Hollist
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 ›
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 ›
Q&A: F.T. Kola
Recognising the critical debate that has surrounded it this year and in the past, AiW has followed the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing by Blogging the Caine Prize again this year. Acknowledging the wider conversation, new and regular authors have shared… Read More ›
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 ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Namwali Serpell’s ‘The Sack’
I am leaning toward a prediction that Namwali Serpell will be the winner of this year’s Caine Prize for a number of reasons. For starters, a win for Serpell would go some way to deflecting one of the major criticisms… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Masande Ntshanga’s ‘Space’
Masande Ntshanga’s title invites the reader to consider multiple conceptions of space. It conjures up stories of exploration, which promise adventure, excitement and fear. At the same time, it evokes the spaces we occupy, and suggests ways of thinking, reading… Read More ›
Celebrating the Publication of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s ‘Dust’
On 4 December 2014, in the grand setting of Marlborough House (Binyavanga Wainaina wryly explains away his lateness as a consequence of getting lost in Prince Charles’s bedroom) a polite, excited crowd gathers to celebrate the publication of Yvonne Adhiambo… 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 ›
Reviews: The Year Ahead in African Fiction
In my current capacity as Reviews Editor, I’d like to highlight in this post some of the new fiction that Africa in Words hopes to engage with in the coming months. While this list is by no means exhaustive and… Read More ›
‘Dust’ by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor – review
AiW Guest jalida scheuerman-chianda The second time I met Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor she was sitting at a round wooden table in the garden of the Kwani? office in Nairobi, waiting to be interviewed on the launch of her debut novel… Read More ›
Reflections on a Kwani? Decade: 27–30 November 2013
In celebration of our 10th Anniversary, between 27th – 30th November 2013 Kwani Trust host a series of literary, creative and artistic events that reflect on our work and its place in the literary history of Kenya, East Africa and… Read More ›
Opportunities and Deadlines for African Writers
The deadline for the Morland Writing Scholarship is 31st October 2013. Up to 3 grants of £18,000 (paid monthly over the course of a year) will be awarded to early career writers to enable them to pursue their work…. Read More ›
Elephants and Metaphors: the Nyamnjoh debate on African anthropology
There’s been an debate going in the pages of Africa Spectrum which we thought might be of interest to some of our readers (hat tip to Stephanie Newell for bringing this to our attention). In 2012, Cape Town-based anthropologist Francis… Read More ›
From the ‘African Booker’ to ‘The Booker’: NoViolet Bulawayo’s ‘We Need New Names’
NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names ends its first and last chapters with the same sensory detail: the alternately ‘dizzying’ and ‘delicious’ smell of Lobels bread. It is a smell that wafts through otherwise macabre scenes. In the first, a woman… Read More ›
