AiW Guest: Joanna Skelt This month, Joanna Skelt continues our deep dive into Eight New Generation African Poets with a review of Blessing Musariri’s Mitu’s Spice Tour. With a title evocative of a culinary travelogue, dreamcatcher-esque cover iconography and powerful series… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Tamara Moellenberg The second edition of Trevor R. Getz’s and Liz Clarke’s Abina and the Important Men (OUP, 2016) creates a scholarly ‘forum’ around Abina, a nineteenth-century Ghanaian woman who sought her freedom from slavery through the British… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Dare Dan Have you seen Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), the gruelling tale of the annihilation of communists in 1965/66 Indonesia? Well, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Hissene Habré: A Chadian Tragedy is such a story; no less provoking,… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Anu Kumar In the title story in Melissa de Villiers’ collection The Chameleon House (Modjaji Books, 2015), Dena, the one who seemingly holds the group together, is always the outsider. As the unnamed narrator reveals, Dena tastes the… Read More ›
AiW Guest Jen Aggleton continues our adventures in African children’s literature. The Rainbow’s Heart is a picture book written and illustrated by Richard Latimer, based on the author’s experiences of travelling in Botswana in the late 1970s. Originally published in 1982, it has… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Jade Lee For all of the genre’s diverse geographical settings, much travel writing has depended on a relatively consistent viewpoint. For the Western reader (especially the white, male variety) there are certain expectations of where the travelogue will… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Jovia Salifu The essays in this anthology, Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction (Dundurn 2016), address the very topics that have made Africa the centre of the world’s attention over the years for all the wrong reasons — disease,… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Dare Dan 1998: An Onitsha man arrives in Lagos at the Surulere offices of Zeb Ejiro, a movie producer. He offers cash to make an instant movie named Scores to Settle (1998), directed by Nigerian auteur Chico Ejiro… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Nard Choi This week, AiW Guest Nard Choi continues our journey into African children’s literature.
AiW Guest: Erica Lombard The illness or death of a parent and the impulse to return in writing to one’s formative years are intimate companions, and have been particularly prevalent tropes in white South African literature of the past two… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Alexandra Schultheis Moore This week, Alexandra Schultheis Moore continues our summer voyage into African children’s literature. First published in 2007 and recently re-issued by Telegram in the UK, Chris Abani’s novella, Song for Night, offers a compelling story as well… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Anu Kumar It is almost an anomaly of sorts: that any literary work from South Africa, as from India for that matter, demands a certain context—who is telling the story and why. But Stacy Hardy’s short stories—and all the… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Jason Allen This month, Jason Allen continues our deep dive into Eight New Generation African Poets with a review of Inua Ellams’ The Wire-Headed Heathen. This is the third chapbook by Nigerian-British performance poet Inua Ellams. The poems display his… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Anthea Gordon Butterfly Fish (Jacaranda, 2015) is primarily a story about Joy, a London-based photographer whose only friend is her eccentric elderly neighbour, Mrs. Harris. Then Joy’s mother dies unexpectedly, leaving her a bemusing inheritance, which includes Joy’s grandfather’s diary and a sculpture of a… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Jovia Salifu In From Pasta to Pigfoot, Frances Mensah Williams tells a beautiful story of cultural education, self-identity, and love. It is a story of a young black woman whose quest for knowledge about her culture and identity… Read More ›
Heather Snell continues our summer voyage into children’s literature. AiW Guest: Heather Snell The Mirror and Nine Other Stories is a product of Langaa, a press with offices in Bamenda and Buea. As Langaa indicates on their website, access to… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Katarzyna Kubin With only days left before the winner of the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing is announced on 4th July, the five short-listed writers have been on a whirlwind circuit of public events throughout London, from a… Read More ›
It’s Caine Prize season again! Before the judges’ announcement on 4th July, we’re taking a look at each of the shortlisted stories. This week, Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva reviews Tope Folarin’s “Genesis.” AiW Guest: Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva Tope Folarin takes us to dizzying spiritual and emotional heights, telling his story… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Iquo DianaAbasi “I rewind time to conjure you back to life.” The above words on the opening page strike a note of foreboding and thus set the tone and pace for the story. Indeed the whole tale rests on this conjuring back to life through… Read More ›
It’s Caine Prize season again! Before the judges’ announcement on 4th July, we’re taking a look at each of the shortlisted stories. This week, Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva reviews Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky.” AiW Guest: Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva The opening line is… Read More ›
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