If anything, I’ve learned that the work of the artist is not to arrive but to remain porous. To reimagine, to return, to make space for what hasn’t yet been spoken. Not a redreaming out of restlessness, but a redreaming as survival. As care. As listening.
Much of the progress made by Black British writers has come through the kindness and mentorship of other diasporic writers. Writing can be a lonely endeavour, and there is always strength in unity. Collectivity can also shift power dynamics with the mainstream, often tipping them a little more in our favour
We who are sheltered know that there are those who are homeless. But what does it mean to think—thinking is active, as against knowing—about those who do not have a home? Thinking births questions: What […]
In this tenth edition of A Long Talk, Liberian poet Jeremy Teddy Karn is in conversation with Ghanaian poet Henneh Kyereh Kwaku. This conversation begins with an depth look on each writer and their relation […]
In this ninth edition of A Long Talk, Nigerian poets Abu Bakr Sadiq and Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto have a deeply profound conversation that touches on life in Nigeria, the present (and future) implications of studying and […]
Zukiswa Wanner is a critically acclaimed South African journalist, novelist and editor who recently released her fifth novel Love, Marry, Kill with South African publisher Kwela. For this seventh edition of A Short Talk, 2025 […]
I have been thinking recently about how once a story, poem, essay (whatever container holds it) exists in the world, the storyteller no longer holds the pen. The readers bring so much of themselves to the page that when they finish, they leave with a completely different experience from the writer, and even every other reader. I love that
Ani Kayode Somtochukwu is a writer and queer liberation activist whose work is a luminous refusal of silence. His debut novel, And Then He Sang a Lullaby, dares to imagine queer love in a world […]
Mumbi Kanyogo is a Kenyan writer and researcher whose work wrestles with the intimate geographies of care, resistance, solidarity, and reimagining. Whether writing about the contradictions of domestic labour, the hollow gestures of imperial apology, […]
Chronic—A Chapbook on Living with Illness, edited by Yvonne Wabai There’s a certain silence that often settles around chronic illness—a quiet that comes not just from pain, but from being disbelieved, misdiagnosed, or forgotten; a […]