Mali Kambandu, shortlisted for the 2018 Writivism Fiction Contest, lives in Lusaka, Zambia, with her husband and two children. Mali’s writing influences are Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, but her most cherished book is To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. While storytelling came early for her, she didn’t write for pleasure until after university at…
Njeri Marasi is a digital marketer, a storyteller, and a blogger at www.workandrelationships.wordpress.com. Her work has been published in Story Moja. Of herself, Njeri says, “I love observing as life happens and making meaning out of everything.” The Water Waves Dry feet by the seashore The waves break, swash! Ah! The cold, soft touch…
The fiction section features a new short story by Abu Amirah, who is a Mombasa-based emerging writer and a second-year student of Psychology. He was shortlisted for the Writivism 2016 short story prize and was mentored by Yewande Omotoso during the Writivism online mentoring program ( 2017). Having attended the Miles Morland Foundation writing workshop in…
September 18, 2017— Graywolf Press has announced the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, to be awarded for a first novel manuscript by an African author primarily residing in Africa. The prize will be judged by A. Igoni Barrett, author of the acclaimed novel Blackass, in conjunction with the Graywolf Editors. The submission period will run from October 1—October…
Limbe is a coastal resort city by the black, sandy beaches of the Atlantic in the Anglophone South West Region of Cameroon. It is also where Africa’s first million dollar novelist, Imbolo Mbue was born and raised. Her debut novel, “Behold the dreamers” is partly set there. Most of the flashback in her novel also goes there. Imbolo’s very moving reminiscences of places like Half Mile, Down Beach and Isokolo, resonated with me a lot because they are all places that I lived in or visited in Limbe while growing up. Yet, no matter how neatly she paints the portrait of that clean city in her novel, it is ironically a place that she left. It is also a city which her novel’s two main characters, Jende and Neni Jonga also leave behind.
A Casualty of Power (Weaver Press, 2016) reads something like a thriller, and it is as difficult to put down, while simultaneously exploring some of the fundamental issues bedevilling post-colonial Africa. The experiences that Hamoonga Moya, the Zambian protagonist, endures will resonate with many in the sub-region. Corruption in high places and the recolonization of…
Laure Gnagbé Blédou whose short story, “I Haven’t Returned”, was shortlisted in August 2016 for Writivism short story competition, is passionate, a woman, lover, mother, daughter, sister, cousin, friend, Africa-ddict, thirty-something, impatient, Ivorian, French, human, reader, speaker, writer, demanding, citizen, vegetarian, traveller, road-trip fan, learner, book-lover, bridge-lover, chocolate-lover, music enthusiast, sharer, feminist, old-school, new-school, journalist.…
Poetry has an indescribable power to do different things to different people. To the Zimbabwean poet and writer Ethel Kabwato, poetry is therapeutic and allows her to be happy, sad, or inspirational. In a wide-ranging interview with Beaven Tapureta, poet Ethel Kabwato revealed how poetry launched her onto a career which she finds self-healing and…
Munyori Literary Journal has just reviewed Manyika’s second novel, Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun, which was published this year by Cassava Republic Press Abuja-London and was officially launched in Harare. The following is an exciting conversation which writer/literary journalist Beaven Tapureta (BT), recently held with Sarah Ladipo Manyika (SLM) about herself,…
Gloria Mwaniga Minage is a high school teacher in Baringo where she also runs a children’s reading club. She is also a freelance writer of literary pieces for The Saturday Nation and The East African newspapers as well as coordinator of Amka, a literary workshop that meets monthly at the Goethe Institut in Nairobi to…
