African writers and publishers should place themselves at the forefront of innovating both the forms and formats of fiction.
And so again, we encourage Africans who care about literature and quality editing to apply for the 2025 Rajat Neogy Editorial Fellowship at A Long House.
‘Pemi Aguda & Uche Okonkwo in conversation about “Form and Destiny”
“I asked the two if they knew where Okot p’Bitek’s grave was. They didn’t, and neither did they know who that was…”
if a poem is intended to “move” readers, as in, enact a kind of change that leaves one different than before they encountered it, it should be especially attuned to detail, to sense and memory.
Ecologists believe that all organisms are connected in a complex web to each other and the material resources that sustain them. Sometimes, the web is literal, the entanglement of roots and fungi found in mycorrhizae. Many humanists adapt the idea to the context of human relations: I am because you are. My existence is predicated on yours.
I think it is important for every writer to define what “winning” is for them. They have to discover what gives them fulfilment or value because writing, the act of putting words on paper for oneself or for others, is quite different from the industry that has sprung up around writing.
A Short Talk is a series of short interviews and conversations with writers, editors, artists, and cultural workers across Africa and the Black diaspora. It is conceived as a companion (not an abridgement or summary) […]
It may be said that we become most aware of the bonds we share when those bonds are threatened; we realize how powerful they had been all along when they become strained. A woman misses her father most acutely when he is no longer around. A man in exile yearns with nostalgic ache for his home country. A marriage, like a manacle, chafes when love grows cold. All of these are fertile nodes of inquiry. But what of our untroubled bonds, what of the relations in which we are at ease? Here Achebe offers us an Igbo proverb by which we advance: “Where one thing stands, another will stand beside it.” There is something against which ease rests, something it stands beside. Literature must illuminate those as well.
Two visual artists: Khaled Olufemi Mamah (Fhemy.raw) and Sambacor Konate (Le Jardin Jolof) discuss African art, fashion, photography, masks, history, and griot tradition in Mali and other parts of West Africa. They speak in the […]