AiW Guest: Pernille Nailor. Written in a clear and powerful language that commands our immediate attention, Unoma Azuah’s latest publication, Embracing My Shadow, is a moving and powerful memoir focusing on the author’s experiences of growing up as lesbian in… Read More ›
memoir
Got my hair, got my head: A review of Living While Feminist: Our Bodies, Our Truths
AiW Guest: Thulani Angoma-Mzini There is a silence, or perhaps a deafness, that the lay man (and particularly the cis-gendered heterosexual man) indulges in when it comes to bodies gendered differently to theirs. The collection of essays titled Living While… Read More ›
Call for submissions: The Igby Prize For Nonfiction, The Kalahari Review (Deadline: 20 August)
You are invited to submit your non-fiction work to The Kalahari Review by 20th August. The theme for this month’s memoir/essay contest at The Kalahari Review is ‘Where we live and why’. Each month The Kalahari Review follows a theme; last… Read More ›
Isaac Fadoyebo: soldier and storyteller between Nigeria and Burma
AiW Guest: Oliver Coates Isaac Fadoyebo’s memoir A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck offers a unique record of one African soldier’s war service in India and Burma. Forced to hide behind enemy lines in the Burmese rainforest for nine months, Fadoyebo’s… Read More ›
Call for Papers: Liberation beyond the Nation (Abstract Deadline: 1st September)
You are invited to submit papers for the conference: LIBERATION BEYOND THE NATION: COMPARISONS, INTERACTIONS AND METHODOLOGIES The conference is supported by the Journal of Southern African Studies and organised by the University of Oxford and the University of the Western… Read More ›
Event: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in conversation (17th April, Harvard Book Store, USA)
We are delighted to announce that Harvard Book Store and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research will welcome renowned Kenyan writer and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—author of the acclaimed novel Wizard of the Crow—for a discussion of his… Read More ›
Call for Chapters: Imagined Communities, Imaginary Scapes: Asian Africans in Exile (Proposals deadline: 1st June)
We are delighted to announce this call for chapter proposals for an edited volume tentatively titled Imagined Communities, Imaginary Scapes: Asian Africans in Exile. The focus for the volume will be on issues of identity and selfhood as explored through literary works,… Read More ›
The Way We Lived – A Review of Chinua Achebe’s ‘There Was a Country’
AiW Guest: Pelu Awofeso After the dust raised in Nigeria by its publication had settled, I finally read There Was a Country, Chinua Achebe’s last published book, which centres on the Nigeria-Biafra civil war and Achebe’s personal experiences of and participation… Read More ›
New African fiction, poetry and non-fiction for the coming months
As the seasons change and Spring begins to arrive here in the UK, it seems a good time look forward to some forthcoming African fiction, non-fiction and poetry releases due over the next few months. What are you looking forward… Read More ›
Compelling narratives: stretching ‘memoir’ in ‘African lives’
Geoff Wisner sets himself a sizeable task in ‘African Lives’, to introduce the life-writing of the continent: I don’t envy this anthologist. His introduction makes the case for the long history of autobiographical writing in Africa. Wisner argues it needs to be rescued, to be… Read More ›
They Will Eat Me in Calabar: tales from the front lines of Nigeria’s National Youth Service Corps
We eventually got to their house, where I was introduced to a middle-aged women. They all spoke in Efik, I did not understand them. So I became more afraid, thinking that they were planning to eat me. The woman asked… Read More ›
The Rise of the African Development Confessional?
AiW guest James Smith. Nina Munk’s The Idealist: Jeffery Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty (Random House) isn’t a book only about Jeffery Sachs. It’s a book about the world as we would like it to be, an uncomfortable… Read More ›