We are thrilled to announced that Brittle Paper’s 100 Notable African Books of the Year List is out. Go HERE to see the beautiful spread.

Lists can feel like endings, but this one is a chance to step back from the constant motion of publicity and release cycles to see what African literary culture looked like this year.

Since 2018, Brittle Paper has put together an annual list of 100 books so that we can pay attention to patterns: what kinds of stories are being told, where they are coming from, how they are circulating, and what boundaries are being pushed. The 2025 list continues that project. It draws from months of tracking African books published in English, alongside translated work entering Anglophone circulation.

This year’s list spans 27 countries, cutting across familiar literary centers and places that still rarely appear in Anglophone conversations. Alongside books from Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, and Ghana are titles connected to São Tomé and Príncipe, the Comoros, Benin, Madagascar, Central African Republic, and other spaces that remind us how partial any single map of African literature must be.

Fiction remains central, but nonfiction continues to expand its share of attention. Poetry had a particularly strong year, appearing across presses and regions. Shout out to Uhlanga and Nebraska University Press for holding the fort on poetry publications. We tried to prioritize translations this year and succeeded in featuring books originally written in Arabic, Shona, Malagasy, French, Swedish, Portuguese, and other languages. At the same time, research for the list surfaced areas of growth that remain unevenly visible, including the rapid expansion of romance publishing and digital-first readerships that do not always register in traditional year-end accounting.

About a third of the books on the list are debuts, a figure that has held steady in recent years and points to ongoing renewal. Just as striking, though, is the number of writers returning with new work after long careers, from mid-career writers like Chimamanda Adichie and Alain Mabanckou to long established voices like Abdulrazak Gurnah and Antjie Krog.

We also wanted to report that the Big Five publishers are prominent on the list but vastly outnumbered by a coalition of Africa based publishers and boutique, mission driven independent publishers in the west.

As always, this list is the result of collective labor. It draws on internal research, long conversations, informal recommendations, and the expertise of people who spend their lives reading, editing, publishing, and thinking about African books. We are grateful to everyone who contributed time and insight the process, and to our readers, whose engagement continues to make this work matter.

The list is now yours to read (or argue with).

How to support:

  • Share the list widely, and tag writers, publishers, or readers who might find something unexpected in it. Feel free to use the graphic below.

  • Follow @brittlepaper on Instagram for ongoing conversations around the books.

  • Buy the books where you can. Each entry on the list has a buy-link. Supporting authors and publishers is one of the most direct ways to sustain the ecosystem this list reflects.