What does the forest know? In African fiction, it has never been merely background. For many African novelists, the forest is something far more alive and strange: a laboratory where the rules of the world can be broken apart and rebuilt.

That argument is at the heart of Brittle Paper founder and University of Wisconsin–Madison scholar Ainehi Edoro’s new book, Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think, and on May 10, 2026, you’re invited to discuss it live.

About the book
Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities. Ainehi Edoro argues that forests in African fiction are laboratories for unmaking and remaking the world, where writers break apart familiar forms to test alternate forms of life, knowledge, and power. Instead of treating the forest as a backdrop, these writers imagine it as a living structure: a space where politics, history, myth, violence, technology, the magical, and creativity animate fictional worlds. Spanning indigenous African narratives and contemporary science fiction, Forest Imaginaries traces the lineage of forest worlds in African literature: Chinua Achebe’s evil forest, the cosmic forest in Wọle Ṣóyínká’s mythic imagination, Thomas Mofolo’s forest of imperial dreams, Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest, and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of new ecological futures. This book rethinks African literary history by showing how African writers draw on the forest—and the wealth of Indigenous ideas about time, space, and storytelling it conjures—to transform the novel’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical horizons.

Buy the book here.

About the author
Ainehi Edoro is a Nigerian literary scholar whose work sits at the intersection of African literature and digital culture. She is the founding editor of Brittle Paper, a leading platform for African literary culture, and a faculty member in English and African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

About the moderator
Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor, and producer who founded the Radical Books Collective. She hosts the interviews-based Radical Futures podcast, and brings a sharp, wide-ranging lens to conversations about literature, politics, and the imagination.

The event is hosted by the Radical Books Collective

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