Ben Okri to Headline the 2019 African Book Festival in Berlin, with Ainehi Edoro, Musa Okwonga as Moderators | All the Guests + Key Events

March 20, 2019

Ben Okri. Photo credit: David Levenson / Getty.

Ben Okri will headline the 2019 African Book Festival in Berlin, curated by Tsitsi Dangarembga, where panels will be moderated by Brittle Paper founder Ainehi Edoro, the Berlin-based writers Musa Okwonga and Clementine Burnley, and TV literary programme host Denis Scheck.

The event—funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, presented by the literary agency InterKontinental, and themed “Transitioning from Migration”—will be held from 4-7 April 2019, at the historic cinema Babylon, Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße 30, 10178 Berlin, and will feature “the finest writers, and artists from Africa and the diaspora to give talks, panel discussions, readings, interviews, theatre and spoken word performances and concerts.” This year’s focus will be on Southern African writing, particularly Zimbabwean.

The inaugural festival in 2018, curated by the Nigerian novelist Olumide Popoola and featuring 40 writers, focused on Nigerian writing. The 2019 event “will gather artists from 21 countries of the world,” up to 46 creatives.

Ben Okri, Nigeria’s only winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction, in 1991 for The Famished Road, is the author of ten novels and numerous collections of poetry, essays and short stories which have been translated into 27 languages. The vice president of the English Centre of International PEN, he has received the Commonwealth Writers‘ Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Preis, and the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore Preis.

Tsitsi Dangarembga, curator of the 2019 African Book Festival in Berlin.

At the festival, Ben Okri will present his newest novel The Freedom Artist, “a penetrating examination of how freedom is threatened in a post-truth society,” as Caine Prize winner Namwali Serpell will her highly anticipated debut novel The Old Drift, hailed as the Great Zambian Novel.

From the press release:

Among the guests is one of South Africa’s most prolific and acclaimed writers, Zakes Mda, who has already published 29 works of prose, drama and poetry and won major literary prizes like the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Also engaging with and reclaiming history are Novuyo Rosa Tshuma (House of Stone, Atlantic Books 2018) and Panashe Chigumadzi (These Bones Will Rise Again, Indigo Press, 2018) exploring Zimbabwe’s forgotten past through fiction and creative non-fiction. South African journalist and acclaimed writer Fred Khumalo and South Africa’s leading feminist thinker Pumla Dineo Gqola can be expected to give fascinating insights during panel discussions.

Thando Mgqolozana is not only present as a novelist, but also as co-author of the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated feature film INXEBA. The Wound (2018) and as the founder of the Abantu Book Festival in Soweto. Novelist and poet John Eppel and performance poet and musician Chirikure Chirikure are among Zimbabwe’s most prominent master craftsmen in verse. The latter will perform a concert blending the power of his lyrics in English and Shona with the sounds of the Mbira. Christopher Mlalazi – novelist and playwright from Zimbabwe who is currently based in Mexico – will be back in Germany after his fellowship at the House of Literature in Hannover in 2013-15.

Writer and publisher Shadreck Chikoti will offer a perspective on Afro-Sci-Fi and publishing Malawi while Zimbabwean writer and journalist Fungai Tichawangana will contribute from his experience as editor and literary facilitator.

The African Book Festival will also summon some young up and coming writers to the German capital. Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker based in South Africa who has just published her very promising magical-realist debut novel The Theory of Flight at Penguin South Africa last year, but does not rest on the critical acclaim of her first work and is already busy finishing her third novel.

Sue Nyathi and Ijangolet S Ogwang are young women writers making a name for themselves in South African literature. Both their works deal with issues of (im)migration xenophobia in South Africa.

Yet not all participants are coming from the south of the continent. Last year’s curator, German-Nigerian writer Olumide Popoola will be back for the Opening Round Table exchanging her curating experiences with Tsitsi Dangaremgba and seasoned publisher and editor Ellah Wakatama Allfrey.

Nigerian writers Sefi Atta and Chiké Frankie Edozien will represent the west-African literary giant, while Senegal-based Ghanaian writer Ayesha Harruna Attah will celebrate the March release of the German translation of her historical novel The Hundred Wells of Salaga.

Writer and publisher Elma Shaw from Liberia, publisher and scholar Bibi Bakare-Yusuf from Nigeria, literary blogger and podcaster James Murua from Kenya, co-founder of the Hargeisa International Book Fair Jama Musse Jama from Somalia, and editor and publisher Yana Makuwa will share their expertise and experience in the literary field.

Actor and chef Ayindé Howell and independent scholar Syl Ko from the US will offer new perspectives on Black veganism while poet, novelist and activist SchwarzRund brings a Black German, queer perspective to the table.

Amazing poetry performances can be expected from Sudan-born and US-based Safia Elhillo who was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30” and was awarded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, Harriet Anena from Uganda who has been awarded the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, and actor Donald Molosi from Botswana.