Ellah Wakatama will deliver Stanford University’s Center for African Studies annual lecture. Wakatama is Editor-at-Large at Canongate and chair of the Ako Caine Prize for African Writing. The title of the lecture is “We Have New Names.” Using NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names as the starting point, Wakatama will look at how “new movements in genre fiction by writers from Africa and her Diaspora are providing new definitions and telling new stories about the past, present and future.”

The event is co-sponsored by various Stanford University departments and programs, including AAAS, CCSRE, Creative Writing Program, Department of English, Institute for Diversity in the Arts, and Comparative Literature.

Date: Thursday, May 13th 2021; Time: 12pm. The lecture is virtual and free, but you do have to save yourself a spot. Follow this link to rsvp. Read Ellah Wakatama’s full bio below:

Ellah Wakatama was born in Zimbabwe, attended college and graduate school in the U.S., and now resides in London. She is editor-at-large at Canongate Books Ltd., a senior research fellow at Manchester University (Centre for New Writing), and chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Allfrey is also a trustee of The Royal Literary Fund and the Caine Prize for African Writing, and sits on the Advisory Board for Art for Amnesty as well as on the Editorial Advisory Panel of the Johannesburg Review of Books.

Allfrey edited Africa39 (2014) and the anthology Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction (2016); she is also a contributor to New Daughters of Africa (2019) and wrote the introduction to Kojo Laing’s Woman of the Aeroplanes (2012). She was made Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the publishing industry in 2011, and in 2016 was named one of New African Magazine’s “100 Most Influential Africans.”