Leila Mottley bounces into the hotel waiting room to meet me. I waste no time with my questions on Nightcrawling, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, making this twenty-year-old the youngest author ever to have been nominated.

Leila Mottley bounces into the hotel waiting room to meet me. I waste no time with my questions on Nightcrawling, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, making this twenty-year-old the youngest author ever to have been nominated.
I write to call their names. The same way we say Breonna, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Trayvon, Botham Jean, Dante Wright, Nizah Morris. I write in celebration.
For a long time, I thought she’d insulted me. Today I think she was trying to define me. "Pédé" must have been the only word she knew. It was the only word she had.
It was neither purely a Nigerian immigrant story nor an African American romance—not even an urban tale. Reader, I decided to self-publish.
Everyone expects us to fail, and to succeed is to be the exception. The space between renders us unremarkable.
Okezie Nwọka on what and who inspired God of Mercy, the difficulties of duality, and adapting Igbo language and culture for the foreign page.
It’s hard to believe that out of 50 translations of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, not one is in the novel’s mother tongue: Igbo.
Where most African literature must harness Western critical acclaim before being celebrated back home, Kintu marks an important first in African literary history.
From the sticky facets of girlhood and the concrete heights of a North Peckham estate to the azure shores of the Zambezi River, these poetry collections instruct us to continually look at our experiences through a multifaceted and human lens.
So begins the project of chronologising and mapping the epos of the Black Atlantic across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Lola Ákínmádé Åkerström talks freely about how In Every Mirror She’s Black upends mainstream ideas about Nordic society, her difficult journey to publication, and writing Black women.
A Stranger's Pose is a dreamy travelogue and memoir through west and north Africa that explores the nature of estrangement, identity, and grief.
Solitude is the real story of In Every Mirror She’s Black, a unique distillation of commercial and literary fiction that ultimately hits like a tragedy.
Who and what are we the product of, and what is the future of this current birthing? I want us to exercise patience as we wait for the arrival of answers.
Safia Elhillo on the inspiration behind Home is Not a Country, her roots, and writing a world that reflects the one she grew up in.
Borne out of her doctoral research on the West African Student Union of 1920s London, Sankofa marks a departure from Chibundu Onuzo's first two novels.
Following Welcome to Lagos, Sankofa marks a departure from Lagosian life and tells the story of a mixed-race British woman's search for her long-lost West African father.
From Brazil and Haiti to Rwanda and Madagascar, travel the world via this list of coming-of-age novels in English translation.