The eighth edition of the African Book Festival Berlin, themed Welcome to the Club and held from May 29 to 31 at tak, Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg, wrapped up with the kind of weekend that reminds you why literary festivals exist. This year’s edition was built differently from previous ones: rather than a single curator setting the thematic direction, the programme was shaped through open calls, public voting, and audience input, with the creative advisory board — Kevin Mwachiro, Chiponda Chimbelu, Ifeatu Nnaobi, Niq Mhlongo, and Edwige-Renée Dro — working alongside the InterKontinental team to give it coherence. The result was a festival that felt genuinely communal, its shape drawn from the desires of the people who showed up.

Saturday was dense with programming. Fatin Abbas (Ghost Season), Nick Makoha (The New Carthaginians), JJ Bola (The Selfless Act of Breathing), Troy Onyango (For What Are Butterflies Without Their Wings), Dudu Busani-Dube (The Blue House), Stella Gaitano (Edo’s Souls), Nadège Kusanika (Unter derselben Sonne), and Amat Levin (Black History) all featured across conversations exploring artistic freedom, identity, and representation. A short film screening and panel, “Der Pinke Faktor – Shall We Meet Tonight?”, examined queer lives and cultural production, offering one of the weekend’s more intimate spaces for dialogue on visibility and storytelling.

Sunday closed the festival with its sharpest panels. “Writing Traumatic Histories” looked at how authors engage with archives and historical memory, a particularly charged conversation given the range of geographies represented across the weekend. “Beyond the Message” took on poetry as resistance and solidarity, and “Men Under Pressure” invited audiences to rethink masculinity, accountability, and collective responsibility. Featured books on the final day included Hemley Boum’s Wind der uns heimträgt, Tete Loeper’s Shut Up and Hide!, and Edna Bonhomme’s A History of the World in Six Plagues. Book clubs AKUMA, AFIWI, and Panafro Bookclub also took the stage, a nod to one of the festival’s most beloved recurring features, which brings book clubs from across Africa and the diaspora into direct conversation with their Berlin counterparts.

The weekend closed with a Poetry Night featuring Jamabie, JJ Bola, Ana Lucão Mvangi, and Nick Makoha — performance, rhythm, and spoken word as a fitting seal on three days of ideas. The African Book Festival Berlin returns next year. Follow @abfberlin on Instagram for updates.

Photos below: