2021

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of female novelists in Nigeria, particularly in fiction. It comes as no surprise that American and European publishers have published the novels of more Nigerian women than those of their male counterparts. This is a welcome development, no less fantastic. The resurgence is also evident in the current […]

Colours of Hatred is a riveting narrative,  coordinating language beautifully and weaving a fine web of intricacies through the different characters Obinna Udenwe presents before us. It could be suggested that Obinna had a fine story and employed characters to help him execute the job and sometimes those characters’ place in the story could be […]

Kola Tubosun (KT): The Girl with the Louding voice, a very fascinating book I read over the last couple of days. I am glad to speak with the writer. Abi Dare (AD): Thank you, Kola. It’s such a pleasure to be here with you. I’ve heard great things. KT: I enjoyed the book very much […]

Out of the eleven names longlisted for the LNG Literary Prize, this month, the Advisory Board released a shortlist of three names shortlisted for the LNG Prize for prose fiction genre. The three stories are dynamic, rich and compelling in their approach to the gender subject and other intersecting themes that are captured through their […]

This is the second time Meron Hadero, the Ethiopian American writer, has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. She made the shortlist in 2019 with her heartbreaking story “The Wall,” though Lesley Nneka Arimah, the Nigerian American, would win the prize with “Skinned,” a riveting, eerie story about gender inequality. Hadero is […]

“We were clowns, children, things….” So starts Rémy Ngamije’s The Giver of Nicknames, where readers are launched into the mind of a hyper-literate narrator who recounts his teenagehood at a private Catholic School in Namibia. From the beginning, Ngamije’s sets out to make the reader aware of the title character’s deft use of language, more […]

“Lucky,” by Doreen Baingana, is a historical-memoir short story that addresses the subject of war and its devastating effects on human society. The immediate allusion to “Gulu District, West Nile” paints in the reader’s mind the impression of the 1980 insurgency⎯which occurred after Idi Amin was toppled a year earlier⎯and places the story perfectly to […]

My encounter with Troy Onyango’s story in Origami was love at first sight. Struck by the story’s opening sentence: First, he plucks a small part of himself and folds it in half; I surrendered to the intimacy of those words that pronounced Onyango as a writer that cares about the efficiency of a sentence. But […]

For World Poetry Day 2021 today, we ask some of our leading contemporary writers to give their thoughts on what work of poetry they will recommend that everyone read at least once in their lifetime. Here are the responses: There is a long and rich history of poetry coming from all the different countries and […]