Writing Our Legacy has opened applications for a special edition of its Covert Talent Development Programme, built around the seventh issue of Covert Literary Magazine themed “Ghana.” Produced in partnership with the Writers Project of Ghana and supported by the British Council’s Beyond Literature Borders fund and Speaking Volumes, the programme is designed to nurture writers living in Ghana as well as those of Ghanaian descent based in the UK. Applications close Wednesday, August 26, 2026, at 10am BST.

Sixteen writers will be selected for the cohort (eight based in Ghana and eight of Ghanaian descent in the UK) for a programme of online workshops, peer-led writers’ groups, mentoring, and editorial feedback running from September through December 2026. Every participant is guaranteed a place in the finished magazine. The guest editor lineup brings together Ghana-based writers Martin Egblewogbe and Mamle Kabu with UK-based writers Derek Owusu and Zoe Adjonyoh, supported by an editorial board spanning both countries.

The theme invites writers to sit with Ghana’s contradictions as much as its pride. Kabu is interested in questions of cultural survival — the erosion of Ghanaian languages across generations, and whether the nation has truly freed itself, in Marcus Garvey’s phrase, from “mental slavery.” Egblewogbe wants work that threads Ghana’s histories into its present and future, with folklore and myth pushing against a increasingly materialistic now. Adjonyoh, meanwhile, frames the issue around Kwame Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanist legacy, asking what Ghana has lived up to and where it’s fallen short — pointedly naming the country’s anti-LGBTQI+ legislation as a place where belonging curdles into exclusion.

The programme includes four workshops between September and November, spanning food writing and memoir with Adjonyoh, dialogue with Kabu, scriptwriting with Anni Domingo, sensory poetry and prose with Kadija Sesay, and structure and plot with Egblewogbe, alongside monthly peer writers’ groups and one mentoring session per participant. UK participants are asked to contribute toward programme costs on a sliding scale from £25 to £100, while all places for writers in Ghana are fully funded through the British Council grant. Applicants must be Black, Asian, or ethnically diverse writers working in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or drama, and full eligibility guidance is available on Writing Our Legacy’s website ahead of the August 26 deadline.