Brittle Paper founder and editor Ainehi Edoro-Glines discussed her first book, Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think, at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Thursday, October 15, in the Lower-Level Program Room at Madison’s Central Library. She was in conversation with Raquel Kennon, and the session was part of the festival’s 25th anniversary edition, which ran from October 15 to 18 at venues across Madison.

The book argues against a familiar way of reading forests in fiction, as settings, symbols, or relics of a premodern past. Instead, Edoro-Glines shows how African novelists have treated the forest as a laboratory for worldbuilding, a place to unmake and remake the world and to imagine new futures. Its reach extends from Chinua Achebe’s evil forest and Wole Soyinka’s mythic cosmos to Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of new ecological futures. You can read more about the book and the event in our earlier announcement.

Thank you to everyone who came out, and to the Wisconsin Book Festival and Madison Public Library for hosting. Look through the photos from the evening here.