Natalie Baszile holds an M.A. in Afro-American Studies from UCLA and is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, where she was a Holden Minority Scholar. An early version of Queen Sugar won the Hurston Wright College Writer’s Award and was a co-runner-up in the Faulkner Pirate’s Alley Novel-in-Progress competition. Excerpts were…
The 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing Workshop is currently taking place in Zimbabwe. Ahead of the event, Fungai Machirori conducted a few interviews with Zimbabwean writers and publishers, as well as Caine Prize Director, Lizzy Attree. Fungai’s article of what was discussed can be found here. “Realising how much great content would go to waste from what was left…
We introduce a new story by Abdifatah Shafat, who explores issues of migration and return. His latest offering, “The Final Visit”, traces the experience of a returned son whose appreciation of the land he grew up has been changed by his stay overseas, yet he has never stopped caring about the home things that matter…
Kagiso ‘Dubla’ Senthufhe, esq., is a social researcher, freelance and creative-story writer based in the sleepy village of Metsimotlhabe in the outskirts of his hometown of Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. He graduated from the University of Botswana (‘UB-Basco’) with a BA degree in Sociology and Public Administration, in 1991, before spending a further two…
SACRAMENTO, CA: Cosumnes River College (CRC) and the Hart Senior Center are holding their seventh annual conference, “Our Life Stories”, on April 12 at the Hart Center. With classes on the craft of writing, this cross-generational conference features some of California’s top authors, writers and poets. The workshops and presentations will address how to write…
We met them in We Need New Names: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and Darling (except this time we can’t quite tell if Darling is still part of the group, if she is the one telling the story. This is left to the reader to decide). Now Noviolet Bulawayo brings them back…
“My review [of We Need New Names] is a very funny one,” says Nkiacha Atemnkeng, “but I think the funniest novel in African literature ever also deserves a funny book review.” This is more than a review. Atemnkeng presents a personal response, in honour of his his role model, NoViolet Bulawayo, the author of one…
TJ Benson, whose “Waiting for Beauty” we feature in hour fiction section, is a male Nigerian short-story writer whose works have appeared in the 14th issue of the Sentinel Literary magazine, the Kalahari Review, Myne Whitman, Aspire.org.ng. He works as a columnist for the online magazine afrisphere.com. He was published in the annual Contemporary Literary Review, India, and he started…
With an insider’s intimacy, author Carine Fabius, in Saturday Comes: A Novel of Love and Vodou, dispels the religious, social and cultural stereotypes and myths shrouding her native Haiti in an atmospheric coming-of-age tale that pits the bourgeois Chenet family against the impoverished Saint Fleurs – their live-in cook Jizzeline and her young daughter Maya. Driven…
The room throbbed with adults – some men dancing with their girls, others leaning intimately against the wall. Flavour was crooning about big arse on the music player. The air was a purple haze, warm, soothing, though it stank of thick fragrances The two friends were laughing hard over a joke, when Amaechi held Chukwudi’s…
