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Aminatta Forna is an author, broadcaster and journalist. She was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Britain, and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of three novels The Hired Man (2014); The Memory of Love (2010), winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award and shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and Ancestor Stones (2006), winner of the PEN Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her critically acclaimed memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, was published in 2002 then serialized on BBC Radio 4 and extracted in The Sunday Times newspaper. |
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Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan novelist and short story writer based in Manchester. Her debut novel, Kintu, won the Kwani Manuscript Project in 2013 and was longlisted for the 2014 Etisalat Prize. It has been called “a masterpiece, an absolute gem, the great Ugandan novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.” |
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Imbolo Mbue is a native of Limbe, Cameroon and has lived in the United States for over a decade, currently residing with her husband and children in New York City. Born to a single mother in a small village in Cameroon, Imbolo spent most of her childhood in houses without electricity or running water. Relatives paid for Imbolo to study in the United States, where she graduated from Rutgers and went on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University by working during the day and going to school at night. She began her career in New York, married, and started a family. |
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Okey Ndibe is the author of the memoir Never Look an American in the Eye: Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts, and the Making of a Nigerian American (2016), the novels Foreign Gods, Inc. (2014) and Arrows of Rain (2000), and co-editor (with Zimbabwean writer Chenjerai Hove) of Writers Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa (2009). The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Mosaic magazine named Foreign Gods, Inc. one of the 10 best books of 2014. The novel was also included in National Public Radio’s list of best books of 2014. |
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Imraan Coovadia is a novelist, essayist, and director of the creative writing programme at the University of Cape Town. He is a graduate of Harvard College and has a doctorate from Yale in English. He is the author most recently of a novel, Tales of the Metric System, described by Publisher’s Weekly as “layered, multifaceted,” testament to the nuanced attention given to the personal lives of diverse South Africans living at various moments of change and transition from 1970 to the present. Indian Express praised the ”fine observations and elegant language, the clever continuity and the unwavering structure which make this a compelling and essential novel.” |
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Deji Bryce Olukotun is a writer and activist who received his bachelor’s degree from Yale College, a law degree from Stanford Law School, and a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, where he worked with notable South African writers such as André Brink, Mike Nicol, and Henrietta Rose-Innes. |
