AiW Guest: Innocent Akilimale Ngulube (Malawi) AiW note: The penultimate in our annual guest reviews of the 2022 AKO Caine Prize 5 shortlisted stories runs today. We’ll also be publishing Q&As with authors and others working with this year’s Prize,… Read More ›
Cassava Republic Press
‘Till Death Do Us Part’: A Review of ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ by Nana-Ama Danquah – AKO Caine Prize shortlist 2022 reviews
AiW Guest: Joseph Kwanya (Kenya) Today’s post is the third of our annual guest reviews of the 5 stories shortlisted for the award in 2022. We’ll also be running Q&As with authors and others working with this year’s Prize, all… Read More ›
Victims and Prey: The Agency of the Body Merchants in Billie McTernan’s “The Labadi Sunshine Bar”- AKO Caine Prize shortlist 2022 reviews
AiW Guest: Nnaemeka Ezema (Nigeria) AiW note: we’ve been holding a series of critical conversations around the work of the Caine Prize, now the AKO Caine Prize, each year since we first joined its “blogathon carnival” back in 2013. Today… Read More ›
A Review of ‘Nairobi Noir’, a collection of short stories edited by Peter Kimani
AiW Guest: Maëline Le Lay. Initially published by Akashic Books, the New York publisher of Kenyan novelist and journalist Peter Kimani (author of the highly regarded Dance of the Jakaranda), this collection of short stories complements the rich collection of “noir”… Read More ›
Celebrating ‘The Decade Project’ with Brittle Paper: 10 AiW African Literary Cultural Faves
Literary blog and archiving platform Brittle Paper turns 10 this year! Happy birthday BP! This month we take up their invitation to join their celebrations in their #DecadeProject with a post marking the last ten years as a significant decade… Read More ›
2018 Africa Writes #P&P – Building an Archive – Voices from the Panel “Loving Womxn: Deliberate and Afraid of Nothing”
AiW note: this review of the panel ‘Loving Womxn’ at the 2018 Africa Writes Festival in London is part of our #Past&Present revisits of our coverage of the festival over the years, in the run-up to the digital conversations of… Read More ›
Words on… Past & Present: re-presenting Jumoke Verissimo’s review of Elnathan John’s ‘Born on a Tuesday’ – The Truth Outside Context
AiW note: This re-post of Jumoke Verissimo’s review of Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday (Cassava Republic, 2016), was first published on AiW as part of the celebrations for the launch of Cassava Republic Press in the UK, back on this same… Read More ›
Words on… Past & Present: re-presenting Temitayo Olofinlua’s review of Jumoke Verissimo’s ‘A Small Silence’ – In the Dark
AiW note: Reposting this, Temitayo Olofinlua’s review, sees it as the third post this week in a mini-series around Jumoke Verissimo’s haunting and lyrical debut novel published last year, A Small Silence (Cassava Republic). Earlier in the week, Verissimo offered us… Read More ›
Q&A: Words on the Times – Jumoke Verissimo
“A Small Silence feels like an act of literary disruption. Hypnotic, expertly crafted and full of subtle power, it challenges cultural norms around silence, darkness and solitude, leaving the reader changed in ways that are hard to define.” Irenosen Okojie, Guardian… Read More ›
Love, Loss and Migrant Womanhood: A Review of “Better Never Than Late” by Chika Unigwe
AiW Guest: Zahra Banday. AiW note: We caught up with our Guest Reviewer, Zahra Banday, for some of her Words on the Times – an AiW series of Q&As, connecting artists, writers, thinkers and educators in our new experiences of… Read More ›
Q&A with writer Olumide Popoola: “If we can’t imagine anything different, we can never strive for change”
AiW note: This conversation follows on from our cast back to last March (2019) and Chelsea Haith’s review of the Q&A’s main text, Popoola’s 2017 novel, When We Speak of Nothing: ‘Experimental…Representative and Complex’ – #PastAndPresent . AiW Guests: René… Read More ›
Festive Favourites: Season’s Reading from Africa in Words
It is that time of year again when the holiday spirit begins to grow. For some, it is a time to spend with family and get away from it all. For others, the holidays might just be a good chance… Read More ›
In the Dark: Review of Jumoke Verissimo’s ‘A Small Silence’
AiW Guest: Temitayo Olofinlua Prof, a pro-democracy activist, has just returned from prison after years of incarceration. And now he chooses to sit in darkness. Whenever he goes out, he is shrouded from head to toe in a dark cloak…. Read More ›
Building an Archive – Voices from the Panel “Loving Womxn: Deliberate and Afraid of Nothing” at the 2018 Africa Writes Festival
AiW Guest: Katarzyna Kubin. It was the second day of the Africa Writes Festival, a week ahead of Black Pride. The heatwave beat on in London whilst, in the British Library, the animated festival crowd buzzed and mingled to and… Read More ›
Q&A: Writer and Filmmaker Yaba Badoe
This weekend at the Africa Writes Pop-Up in Bristol, Yaba Badoe will launch The Secret of the Purple Lake (Cassava Republic Press) – a collection of five interlinked stories that take us from Ghana to Orkney, and from Spain to… Read More ›
Event: Africa Writes Bristol Pop-Up, 6-7 October 2017
Africa Writes, the UK’s biggest annual African literature and book festival brought to you by the Royal African Society, comes to Bristol for the first time, from Friday 6th October to Saturday 7th October 2017, presenting a vibrant programme of… Read More ›
“I write what I like”: Aké Arts & Book Festival 2016 in Abeokuta, Nigeria
AiW Guest: Nathan Suhr-Sytsma The fourth incarnation of the Aké Arts & Book Festival took place 15-19 November 2016, in Abeokuta, Nigeria, the birthplace of Wole Soyinka, and shares a name with Soyinka’s classic memoir of his childhood, Aké. The… 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 ›
Event: Cassava Republic Press Salon with Hawa Jande Golakai and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, 27 May 2016, London
Event: Cassava Republic Press Salon with Hawa Jande Golakai and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, hosted by Margie Orford in Waterstones Piccadilly, London