25 New Books by African Writers You Should Read Tahar Ben Jelloun, A. Igoni Barrett, Yaa Gyasi, and many more. Or Something Like That is one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read. Water: New Short Story Fiction from Africa: An Anthology from Short Story Day Africa.

For 100 days, Juliane Okot Bitek recorded the lingering nightmare of the Rwandan genocide in a poem—each poem recalling the senseless loss of life and of innocence. Okot Bitek draws on her own family’s experience of displacement under the regime of Idi Amin, pulling in fragments of the poetic traditions she encounters along the way: the Ugandan Acholi oral tradition of her father, the poet Okot p’Bitek; Anglican hymns; the rhythms and sounds of slave songs from the Americas; and the beat of spoken word and hip-hop. April 1: (Nebraska University Press) Along with publishing a first book by an emerging new African poet each year, the Africa Book Fund has also committed to publishing a collected edition of “a major living African poet” each year, and this year it is Gabriel Okara, the only person who could ever be called both “the elder statesman of Nigerian literature and the first Modernist poet of Anglophone Africa.” Those who know, know who he is; who no know, go know.

April 12: from Short Story Day Africa (Edited by Karina Szczurek and Nick Mulgrew New Internationalist) This is the third year these good folks in South Africa have collected and published previously unpublished short fiction on a theme, and each year their vision gets broader (and they already have a fantastic track record of discovering hitherto unknown writers). Crestline windows dealers. I did with Rachel last year, she described SSDA’s evolution: We’d always intended the project to develop organically, though how we thought that would happen turned out to be very different to the end result. I guess we didn’t expect the response to the project that it got.

I think, when it started, writers on the continent were looking for somewhere to publish their work, work that didn’t necessarily have appeal to a Western publishing industry that pretty much wanted to tell the same stories the media was telling about Africa. Social media was just a couple of years old and it was either get published in the West, or you were pretty much voiceless. In the first year, we just published an extended circle of writers we knew and writers they knew on a website I’d thrown together. We were email based then. The second year we were inundated with requests from writers to send us their stories, and we started the Facebook page. By the third year, writers beyond Southern Africa were asking to be included, so we changed the name, made a new Facebook page and opened it up to any African writer.