It feels exceptionally hard in a short review to do justice to the layers of story, character and life in A. Igoni Barrett’s second collection of short stories Love is Power or Something Like That. The characters that people these stories range across generation… Read More ›
On Monday Tope Folarin’s ‘Miracle’ was announced as the winner of the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing. Building up to this announcement the five shortlisted writers spent a week in the UK, talking about their writing in the media… Read More ›
Mukoma wa Ngugi, son of world renowned African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, is currently in London with his father for a public conversation at the Africa Writes festival, and the launch of his new crime fiction novel Black Star Nairobi…. Read More ›
This weekend all three editors of Africa in Words will be at Africa Writes 2013 in London – an African literature and book festival hosted by the Royal African Society. The festival is hosting some of the most exciting names… Read More ›
AiW Guest Emylia Hall One of my favourite quotes on the subject of the craft of writing comes from the Pulitzer Prize-winner, Katherine Anne Porter: ‘Get so well acquainted with your characters that they live and grow in your imagination exactly… Read More ›
AiW Guest Sylvia Gasana Hauntingly beautiful! Those are the two first words that come to mind when describing Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s ‘The Whispering Trees’. I’m always very excited to read a story that has a title that instantly transports you…. Read More ›
Coming to the Caine Prize blog party late in terms of Pede Hollist’s ‘Foreign Aid’, I’m aware that a lot of the ground on this story has already been covered – see the end of this post for links to… Read More ›
AiW Guest Gbemisola Abiola. Tope Folarin’s Miracle depicts the prevailing belief in Christian supernaturalism, and the apparent promise of prosperity it holds for the African adherent, as the means of achieving success in the Diasporas. While the story is set in… Read More ›
Last week saw the announcement of the shortlist for the 14th Caine Prize for African Writing. The shortlist of 5 stories was selected by judges Gus Casely-Hayford (Chair), Sokari Douglas Camp, John Sutherland, Nathan Hensley and Leila Aboulela out of… Read More ›
Now available from Chimurenga [from the Shona word for “revolutionary struggle”]: the CHRONIC – a new pan-African quarterly print gazette, with supplementary books review magazine CHRONIC BOOKS – see below for a preview of Billy Kahora‘s article on the Nairobi noir. The first issue takes… Read More ›
AiW Guest Steve Haines Working in the world of ‘international development’ I’m easily tempted to measure a country by metrics and indices. What interests me is the percentage of the population with access to safe drinking water, the primary school… Read More ›
AiW Guest Rebecca Jones Is memory imagination or plagiarism? Are artists curators or creators of memory? Is memory determined by audience? Do we remember or embroider? – these were some of the questions we sought to explore in a one-day… Read More ›
AiW Guest Ruth Bush This lively one day event took place in London at Senate House on 20 October 2012, was led by Dr Caroline Davis (Oxford Brookes) and brought together a number of researchers working in the broad area of… Read More ›
AiW Guest Dzekashu MacViban In December 2012, I travelled to Nairobi for the 2012 Kwani? Litfest as part of the Goethe Institut’s pan-African exchange programme ‘Moving Africa’. Of the various panels and readings I attended four stood out: our Moving… Read More ›
Yari Yari Ntoaso: Continuing the Dialogue is a symposium of literature by women of African descent taking place in Accra, Ghana, May 16-19, 2013. This free gathering will put writers, critics, and readers from across Africa, the USA, Europe, and the Caribbean in dialogue with… Read More ›
Chatting to Nancy Richards about AiW on SAfm’s Word of Mouth feature, part of the Literature show, on Sunday (03/03), I was struck once again by the significance of the generative potential of literary and intellectual networks across the continent,… Read More ›
As avid AiW readers will know, last Autumn at the African Studies Association of the UK Biennial Conference, Katie Reid and I co-convened a series of panels on ‘The “post-millennial context” and African writing in English: Writing, production and reception since… Read More ›
AiW Guest Stephanie Bosch Santana. Traces of Binyavanga Wainaina’s address, “I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan”, delivered at September’s African Studies Association UK 2012 conference, have lingered with me over the past few months: the image of invisible digital networks of… Read More ›
AiW guest Helen Cousins. 2012 was the year of ‘legacy’ – a notion popularised, of course, by the London 2012 Olympics. Four months on from the African Studies Association UK conference, I want to reflect on my personal ‘legacy’ from… Read More ›
AiW Guest Rebecca Jones. 2012’s ASAUK conference at the University of Leeds was my first ever ASAUK conference, and I went anticipating some interesting panels on African literature, hoping to meet fellow scholars of Yoruba, and, to be honest, expecting a… Read More ›
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