African Writing

14/10/2023

“Don’t feel that you have to tailor your literature a particular way to please any school of ideology. There will emerge in its own right, effortlessly, some kind of ideological direction which is a reflection of your thinking and you want your thinking, above all.”

- Some words of advice to young writers from 1986 literature laureate Wole Soyinka.

Playwright and political activist Soyinka started writing from an early age and published his first plays in 1963. In total, he has published about 20 literary works in various genres such as drama and poetry.

All his plays have strong poetical elements and many also have political elements. He is known for being outspoken about his home country, Nigeria’s, politics and has been imprisoned for his criticism of the government. During the civil war in Nigeria in the middle of the 1960s he was drawn into the struggle for liberty because of his opposition to violence and terror.

Soyinka’s collection of poems ‘A Shuttle in the Crypt’ was written during the writer’s two years in prison from 1967 to 69. They are poems about mental survival, human contact, anger and forgiveness. A few years after being released from prison (1972), Soyinka published ‘The Man Died: Prison Notes’, a novel with his prison notes that recounts how he was tortured. His two-year imprisonment was an experience that drastically affected his outlook on life and literary work.

The 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Soyinka “who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence.”

Read more about Wole Soyinka: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/facts/

13/10/2023

Congratulations to on winning the 2023 Nigeria Prize for Literature with his amazing book, GRIT.

Job well done, The Nigeria Prize for Literature

21/07/2023

"Do not be in a hurry to rush into the pleasures of the world like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come."

- Chinua Achebe

20/07/2023

Congratulations 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

The wait is over!

Here are the 11 plays that have secured their place on the longlist.

Congratulations to all the writers who have made it to the longlist!

14/07/2023

Skirt
By Niyi Osundare

Come,
Sweetheart
Come tonight

Let’s meet in the elbow
Of the street
Skip all care

Breach all walls
Jump over the gutter
Of the moon

Come, sweetheart
Don’t forget to come
In our favourite skirt

Read more of Osundare's poems here: https://www.african-writing.com/Sep/osundare.htm

13/07/2023

Happy 89th birthday to a literary icon, Wole Soyinka!

04/07/2023

"Words cannot be swallowed back. When they are as foul and bitter as the nastiest vomit, you can’t even try. For as long as she could remember, Lerato had desperately wanted to liberate her mother from her little world."
- Gertrude Makhaya, Four Women

Read here: https://www.african-writing.com/five/gertrudemakhaya.htm

26/06/2023

Agbo Areo played an important role in the promotion of African Literature, and will be missed dearly.

Date of his funeral has been fixed for July 26th to 28th, 2023.

Watch his conversation with Chuma Nwokolo few weeks before his passing:

The famous Pacesetters Series published by Macmillan in the '70s and '80s had 130 young adult novels which sold across Africa in hundreds of thousands of cop...

24/06/2023

Join the premiere for Agbo Areo's final conversation on YouTube where he talks about his role in the creation of Macmillan's Pacesetters series:

The famous Pacesetters Series published by Macmillan in the '70s and '80s had 130 young adult novels which sold across Africa in hundreds of thousands of cop...

24/06/2023

https://nwokolo.com/y/agbo-areo-pacesetters-pioneer-1940-2023/

When a boxing champion takes the gold, his manager is standing ringside to share in the accolades and fame. Editors, even of the most iconic books, are a more invisible tribe. Yet, some denizens of literature bestride both the editorial and the authorial. Agbo Areo was such a one, an editor and a writer with a significant influence on a generation of readers. And writers.

Agbo Areo had ‘disappeared’ for decades, but back in March 2023, I felt a strong desire to track him down. He was an important figure in African literature for his role in the creation of the Macmillan Pacesetter series. Not only had he designed our most influential Young Adult pan-continental series, but he had also written the very first book that templated the series. He was therefore an author and editor who had been active in the Nigerian publishing hotbed of Lagos/Ibadan. Yet, for many years I had heard no word from him.

I started my search for Agbo Areo by asking people who should know: my writer, editor, and publisher friends across Lagos and Ibadan. I got no joy. Mr. Areo had apparently disappeared into a very private life, post-retirement. I talked to my cousin, Irene Ubah, who had originally introduced me to him. But she had lost touch with him. Tade Ipadeola, my touchstone poet for Ibadan affairs, had not seen him either. Okey Ndibe’s trusty Ibadan tentacles came back negative.

I tried online, of course, and the only reference to Agbo Areo took me to what felt like the longest street in Ibadan. As I drove down this potholed habitat of bookmakers and sellers of printing materials, I got many confident directions from people who should have frankly confessed that they had no clue who I was talking about. As I drove deeper into this bowel of Ibadan I happened upon medieval scenes meet for Yoruba Nollywood, but as for the old man I sought, I found not a trace. At the back of my mind was the dread that nature had happened to Mr. Areo. He had to be in his 80s, and as a series that flowered in the ’70s and ’80s, many of my fellow Pacesetter writers had already joined the guild of literary ancestors.
...

When a boxing champion takes the gold, his manager is standing ringside to share in the accolades and fame. Editors, even of the most iconic books, are a more invisible tribe. Yet, some denizens of literature bestride both the editorial and the authorial. Agbo Areo was such a one, an editor and a wr

24/06/2023

"You can’t believe in love at first sight unless you’ve felt it yourself. Unless you’ve stood at the door watching him come up the stairs, leather jacket on his masculine shoulders, a cigarette smouldering in his lips, and that wide-eyed smile he reserves for you. You understand the concept of now, of living now and only in this moment, all you have is now, now stretching out into the anticipation of an evening."

Arja Salafranca, Cleo and Nic

Read here: https://www.african-writing.com/five/arjasalafranca.htm

19/06/2023

"If you want to know a country, read its writers." - Aminatta Forna (author of The Memory of Love).

13/06/2023

"Now the once proud and young nations creaked and fell under the rust of corruption and poverty. One by one. Statesmen had turned into paranoid dictators and their young sons were older drunkards. Their wives were oppressed and overwhelmed. The society was staggering and sick. And dying. Dying of a strange new disease."
- Sachdeva Otieno Gaya

Read Sachdeva Otieno Gaya's "In This Hope" here: https://www.african-writing.com/five/sachdevagaya.htm

10/06/2023

"My choice of the genre in which to express myself at any given time depends on the themes and subject. If poetry will be more expressive I choose it. But sometimes I don’t even think of that; the thing just comes [...]."
- Gabriel Okara

https://www.african-writing.com/six/gabrielokara.htm

07/06/2023

"If a story is positively representing a people and culture and going against what has been the prevailing orthodoxy of the negative kind of African issues, then that talks to me too [...]."
- Emma Dawson

Read here: https://www.african-writing.com/four/emmadawson.htm

05/06/2023

"Often I sit and decide that this is what I want to write about, but as the process goes on you realise that it's coming out totally differently from how you had set it out. That is how I approach all my stories. And since I do not feel like I set forth immediately with a preconceived idea of what I want to say, I kind of feel that all my stories, including this one, choose me."

- Monica Arac de Nyeko

Interviewed by Molara Wood. Read here: https://www.african-writing.com/four/monicaaracdenyeko.htm

01/06/2023

"For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian." - Ama Ata Aidoo

The renowned Ghanaian author and playwright died Wednesday, 31 May 2023 aged 81.

May her soul rest in peace.

💔

26/05/2023

"The writing scene is such a big and complex universe, with lots of good and bad things happening. The best a writer can do is to keep doing what he knows best, to write as honestly as possible, never to be swayed by the ephemeral glitter, the shallow praises, to always keep an eye on history, on posterity."

- Helon Habila

Read full interview here: https://www.african-writing.com/four/helonhabila.htm

23/05/2023

"It was not as if they had a perfect marriage. But who did? He said she nagged too much. But that was what women were for. They told men what to do because men frequently did not know what to do. And so it had been since the day of Adam and Eve."
- Cheluchi Onyemelukwe, Identity Theft.

Read here: https://www.african-writing.com/five/cheluchionyemelukwe.htm

17/05/2023

"As we stopped I pushed the heavy car door open and jumped out onto the forest floor, my young legs restless from inactivity. Here I could drink in the sweet perfume of life. Here was my beginning and my coming home, here was my sustenance, mother-father-comforter, this sweet earth and great sky, this my Africa. I must love her though she turn from me, burn me, starve me, for she was the soil in which I grew. I knew it then as I know it now, and will always know it. It is both my tragedy and my benediction."

- Fiona Jamieson, The Blanket

Read here: https://www.african-writing.com/five/fionajamieson.htm

15/05/2023

"Writing requires a certain frame of mind. It requires you to shift from trying to be good at things that people want you to be good at – in order that they may consider you to be a valuable member of society – to working at the things that really interest you and possibly being considered a little odd as a result. Being considered an oddity never killed anyone, and it can be deeply satisfying."

- Rosemary E. Ekosso

Read here: https://www.african-writing.com/five/dibussitande.htm

08/05/2023

"I have long since learned that it is useless trying to talk to him. He no longer has anything to say. At lunchtime, the nurse brings in two trays of food and we eat in silence. After lunch we go back to our duty of sky-watching [...]."

Read "My Brother's Eyes" by Cynthia Price here: https://www.african-writing.com/five/cynthiaprice.htm

03/05/2023

"The saddest thing about this incident is that the police and secret service took a young man and tortured him for a play whose script they never read or whose performance they never saw. If they didn’t watch the show or read the script, on what basis did they stop the show and torture the artist? This must have all free thinkers very worried."

Read here: https://www.african-writing.com/five/raisedonbaya.htm

01/05/2023

"Books saved you. Having become your refuge, they sustained you. The power of books, this marvelous invention of astute human intelligence. Various signs associated with sound: different sounds that form the word. Juxtaposition of words from which springs the idea, Thought, History, Science, Life. Sole instrument of interrelationships and of culture, unparalleled means of giving and receiving. Books knit generations together in the same continuing effort that leads to progress. They enabled you to better yourself. What society refused you, they granted."
- Mariama Bâ

26/04/2023

The house I live in

The house I live in is not my own.
It is that strange kind
you find only
in the strangest of places or
in the middle of nowhere,
where only a wrong turn on
a wrong road leads.

I live in this house with one window,
one door
shut against the outside world
open only to keys
lost in a warder's keyring.

Everyday I place my head between
the window bars
gazing at comrades turning right,
right to here.

The house I live in is not my own.
I sit on sunset chair rocking what's left of the day.

- Obemata

Read more of his poems here:

Obemata is a Nigerian poet whose works have appeared in Sentinelpoetry, Allpoetry, Liberty, African-Writing, ''-an anthology of poetry, ed. John B. Lee (Serengeti Press, 2004) and ''-anthology of Nigerian Poets, ed. Unoma Azuah (Chappal Waddi Books, forthcoming). He lives in Farnham Royal, England a...

24/04/2023

""He’s the only man I have ever loved."

"You’ll love others."

"I won’t."

"We all learn to love other people, Cleo, that’s life."

"What do you mean?"

But her father was already getting up from his chair."

- Arja Salafranca

Read story here: https://www.african-writing.com/five/arjasalafranca.htm

22/04/2023

Sierra Leone's Independence Day is on April 27 and it is the perfect occasion to curl up with these amazing books written by Sierra Leonean writers to honor the literary and political heritage of this African nation. We want to take this opportunity to celebrate some of the best literary treasure

19/04/2023

"I am more willing to take the risk that the reader will fail to get something than I am willing to risk losing the reader by condescending to explain everything. Reading is a dialogue with a text, there is an effort that you have to make: is this meant to mislead me, is the irony here intended, surely there is another way of reading this, why does he keep mentioning the moon, what does it all mean. Reading is an active process, at least, the reading of literary fiction is an active process of engaging with the text."

- Petina Gappah

Read here: https://www.african-writing.com/seven/petinagappah.htm?s=09