aminatta forna

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Features, Lit Scene, News 2018/10/08

The Revealing Reason Why Aminatta Forna Likes Writing Male Characters

Last year, Somali writer and visual artist Diriye Osman, author of the Polaris Award-winning story collection Fairytales for Lost Children and the forthcoming novel We Once Belonged to the Sea, explained the concept of literary androgyny: that gender-straddling sensibility possessed by the best storytellers—women writing men, men writing women. But Aminatta Forna, from the interview […]

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Features, Lit Scene, News 2018/09/07

The 2018 Open Book Festival Begins in Cape Town

The 2018 Open Book Festival has begun at The Fugard Theatre in Cape Town. The event, which is in its seventh year, will last from 5-9 September, with further activities at The District 6 Museum Homecoming Centre and The Book Lounge. Among the 2018 guests are Aminatta Forna, whose fourth novel Happiness dropped earlier in the […]

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Features, Lit Scene, News 2018/08/14

I Started Reading and Just Stopped Halfway and Thought—This is Really Bad | What Achebe, Soyinka, Adichie, Forna, Binyavanga, Teju Cole, Serpell Thought About VS Naipaul

VS Naipaul, Nobel Prize and Booker Prize-winning novelist and nonfiction writer, passed on days ago at 85 years of age. As is the norm, countless think pieces have appeared on his life. While Naipaul’s genius talent and his standing as a literary great aren’t in doubt, it is his legacy that stutters. Born in Trinidad […]

Five Beautiful Acts of Generosity by African Writers

In the midst of the pressure to deliver under that heavy tag “African Writer,” in the back and forth between critics and between writers and between critics and writers, in the midst of big novels and million-dollar book deals and accumulating prizes, it is easy to lose sight of community and what it means to […]

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Features, Lit Scene, News 2018/07/09

What Chimamanda Adichie, Taiye Selasi, Aminatta Forna and Kayo Chingonyi Are Reading This Summer

What do your favourite writers read during summer? Last year, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie read Isabel Wilkerson’s 2010 historical migration study The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration; and Imbolo Mbue read Jennifer Makumbi’s modern classic Kintu, alongside Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing; Naoki Higashida’s memoir of living with severe autism, Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8; […]

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Features, Lit Scene, News 2018/03/11

Aminatta Forna’s Novel, “Happiness,” Is Out, and She Is on the Cover of Kirkus Reviews

Last November, we brought news of Aminatta Forna’s fifth book and fourth novel, Happiness. The book is now out, and after the first reviews, Forna is on the cover of Kirkus Reviews, the literary world’s leading magazine for book reviews. We are not in the least surprised as Forna is one of the most critically acclaimed fiction […]

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Features, Lit Scene, News 2018/03/08

12 Women, 16 Novels: An African History of the Women’s Prize for Fiction

In 1991, the six-name Man Booker Prize shortlist contained only men. Thoroughly dissatisfied, a group of female and male authors, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians and journalists decided to create a new prize. In 1996, the Women’s Prize for Fiction was founded, to recognize the best original full-length novel in English by a woman, published in the […]

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Features, Lit Scene, News, Stories and Poems 2018/02/12

The Brittle Paper Digest: 79 Notable Pieces of 2017

It isn’t that time of the year when we look back on what happened in it—that time is December, and this is February. But a delay in releasing this list seemed inevitable for a year that, on several levels, saw our literary culture expand. Organisations took groundbreaking steps: in March, Jalada Africa held a 12-city, […]

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