You are cordially invited to the Public Conversation, ‘What Is Happening in African Literature Today?’, which offers a platform to literary critics, editors and translators to meet colleagues from different parts of the continent and discuss trends and themes prevalent in our literature today.
The event is organised by Wawa Book Review in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Nigeria and features three key speakers: Otieno Owino from Nairobi, Kenya, who will speak about East African Literature; M. Lynx Qualey from Rabat, Morocco, who will speak about North African Literature; and Indra Wussow from Johannesburg, South Africa, who will speak about the reception of African Literature in Germany.
The conversation will be moderated by Joy Chime, the Managing Editor of Wawa Book Review.
Date and Time: Friday, 31st May at 6pm.
Venue: Angels and Muse, 5 Sumbo Jibowu Street, off Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, Lagos.
Otieno Owino worked for four years as an Assistant Editor at the Kenyan literary publisher Kwani Trust. At Kwani,he was part of the editorial teams on the Kwani Manuscript Project and the Kwani journal. He was Junior Editor for Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, an anthology put together by Commonwealth Writers in which he worked with renowned editor Ellah Wakatama Allfrey. His recent projects were as co-editor for SSDA’s ID anthology (2018). Otieno completed an MLitt in Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling, UK, in 2017 as a Commonwealth Scholar. He lives in Nairobi.
M. Lynx Qualey is a critic, book editor, translator, and independent scholar who runs the ‘ArabLit’ website (www.arablit.org), which won a 2017 London Book Fair prize. She also publishes ArabLit Quarterly magazine and co-hosts the Bulaq podcast. Her translation of the middle-grade novel Ghady and Rawan, by Fatima Sharafeddine and Samar Mahfouz Barraj, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press (August 2019), and she recently won the 2019 Columbia College Literary Review Editors’ Prize Contest for her short story ‘Tell a Stranger What You Do’.
Indra Wussow studied Comparative Literature and Translating in Erlangen, Germany, Berkeley, US, and Florence, Italy, and is working as a freelance curator, writer, literary translator and journalist. She is the editor of a series of contemporary African fiction called Africa Wunderhorn that ‘is regarded as pioneer work, focused on introducing contemporary African Literature to a German-speaking readership’. She has translated several works of fiction from English and Italian into German and has published literary reviews extensively in both German and South African newspapers and magazines. Her private arts NGO, Sylt Foundation, has connected numerous artists and writers through residencies and interdisciplinary art projects since 2004. Currently, Indra Wussow is the chief curator of the Sylt Foundation’s long-term project ‘Transformation & Identity, Trauma & Reconciliation’, that brings together writers and artists to collaboratively re-visit national histories, transformations and the trauma related. It involves artists from the countries of Cambodia, Chile, Columbia, Israel, Poland, Rwanda, South Africa and Germany. Since 2019 the project ‘Diverse People Remember’ added community workshops in storytelling and arts therapy to share experiences of transformation and trauma among diverse audiences in the different countries. Indra currently lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Yangon, Myanmar.
