The Brittle Paper Awards is our way of recognizing the finest, original pieces of literature by Africans available online for free. We began it in 2017 to mark our seventh anniversary. The $1,100 cash prize is spread across five categories which reflect our efforts to capture the range and variations of literary dialogue on the continent: the Brittle Paper Award […]

To mark BRITTLE PAPER‘s 7th anniversary in 2017, we organised two conversations on our Facebook page. The second, themed “Un-Silencing Queer Nigeria: The Language of Emotional Truth,” took place on 5 August 2017 and was an insightful, urgent conversation about queerness and its exploration in Nigerian literature. Our guests were: Romeo Oriogun, winner of the 2017 […]

“It wasn’t the first novel I wrote,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told the audience at the University of Nairobi, during her lecture in honour of Kwani? Magazine’s 10th anniversary, and then she joked: “I wrote other bad novels which I hope nobody ever sees. But Purple Hibiscus was the first one that I loved.” When she […]

In August, we reported Kola Tubosun’s essay on Wole Soyinka’s art-filled house in Abeokuta forest. Published on Popula, “A House for Mr Soyinka“—a title alluding to V.S. Naipaul’s novel—has since been shortlisted for the 2018 Brittle Paper Award for Creative Nonfiction. At 84 years of age, Wole Soyinka’s life lives—to use Teju Cole’s phrasing on a […]