Jennifer Tennant

  • In celebrating a July literary birthday, we reflect on the life and work of Nobel prize winner, Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, better known as Wole Soyinka, born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, on 13 July 1934. Long before #BlackLivesMatter, there was Wole Soyinka. The playwright, essayist, novelist, poet and political activist has, for more than a half…

    Read more →

  • Kofifi was a thriving place of light and dark, of hopes and dreams, and ultimately of thwarted lives and loss. And writer, journalist and philosopher Can Themba, fitted right in. Daniel Canodoise Themba, who was born in Pretoria’s Marabastad on 21 June 1924, was a charismatic writer bursting with talent in a country that went…

    Read more →

  • David Diop has won the prestigious International Booker Prize for translated fiction with his novel At Night All Blood Is Black about a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in World War I. The Paris-born writer is the first French winner of the prize, given for a book translated into English, and shares the award with…

    Read more →

  • The African Speculative Fiction Society has announced its short list for the 2021 speculative fiction awards in the following categories: Fiction – the Ilube Nommo Award Akwaeke Emezi: The Death of Vivek Oji (Riverhead Books) Stephen Embleton: Soul Searching (Guardbridge Books) Nikhil Singh: Club Ded (Luna Press Publishing) Short story Tiah Marie Beautement: The Bend of…

    Read more →

  • Life, at full volume

    How I found comfort in the queue for a Covid-19 vaccination. Thursday afternoon my phone buzzed with an SMS, “you have been scheduled for vaccination on 21 May between 2pm and 4pm”. I cannot tell you the complexity of feelings that went through me at that moment, of relief, of fear, of gratitude, of stress.…

    Read more →