Three African and diaspora writers feature among the 25 names announced by the Civitella Ranieri Foundation as its newly selected Writing Fellows for the 2027 and 2028 residency seasons. Civitella Ranieri, an international artist residency housed in a 15th-century castle in Umbria, Italy, has hosted over 1,000 fellows since its founding in 1995, and its alumni list includes Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and National Book Award winners. Selected from a competitive pool by an independent jury, the new fellows will join one of eight cohorts over the next two years for a fully funded six-week residency, working alongside composers, visual artists, and fellow writers.

Sudanese-American poet Safia Elhillo is among the most distinguished names on the list. Her work, including The January Children, winner of the Arab American Book Award, and the verse novel Home Is Not a Country, a National Book Award finalist, has built a body of poetry centered on displacement, language, and the particular inheritance of growing up between Sudan and the diaspora. Elhillo joins a list that includes Hanif Abdurraqib, Carmen Maria Machado, Danez Smith, and Eileen Myles, among other major contemporary voices.

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is the Zimbabwean novelist, scholar, and filmmaker behind the celebrated “City of Kings” trilogy, The Theory of Flight, winner of the 2019 Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize and now a school setwork text in South Africa, followed by The History of Man and The Quality of Mercy. Her fourth novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People, was longlisted for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award, placing her alongside Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ocean Vuong on that year’s list. Ndlovu, who holds a PhD from Stanford and previously spent nearly two decades in North America, now lives back home in Bulawayo, and is also a 2022 Windham-Campbell Prize recipient.

Another African writer on the list is Stephanie Wambugu, born in Mombasa, Kenya, and raised in Rhode Island, now living and working in New York. Her debut novel, Lonely Crowds, a story of a volatile, decades-spanning friendship between two women navigating Catholic school, college, and New York’s 1990s art world, was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction at the Publishing Triangle Awards, and was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Wambugu, who is also an editor at Joyland Magazine, has described the novel as deeply shaped by her own Kenyan immigrant background, even as she resists having it read as straightforward autofiction.

Civitella Ranieri’s Writing Fellow program has a meaningful history with African literature: past fellows have included A. Igoni Barrett and Eghosa Imasuen, both Nigerian novelists who have spoken warmly of how the residency’s quiet rhythms shaped their work. With Elhillo, Ndlovu, and Wambugu’s selection, three distinct strands of African and diasporic writing, verse rooted in Sudanese displacement, magical-realist reckoning with Zimbabwean nationhood, and a Kenyan-American coming-of-age told through the lens of obsessive friendship, head to the Umbrian countryside over the coming two years.