Brittle Paper, the leading online destination for African literature, will host its inaugural Brittle Paper Literary Festival on Saturday, 29 August 2026. The one-day festival celebrates emerging writers in the African literary space. Listen to poetry and fiction readings from writers who got their
Angélique Kidjo has made history. On August 18, 2026, the Beninese-French singer became the first African musician and first Black African to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, honored at a ceremony on Hollywood Boulevard that drew film stars, music industry heavyweights, and members of h
As summer slowly winds down, the beach days, vacations, long afternoons, and lazy hours with a book will soon become memories. But before the season slips away completely, we’re taking stock of the books that gave us something to talk about. From Fatima Bala’s The Lies We Tell, which arrived in late
Shirlene Obuobi, the Ghanaian American cardiologist, cartoonist, and author of On Rotation and Between Friends & Lovers, is back with Die for Me, a dark, genre-bending romance that asks what happens when falling in love means confronting the possibility that the person you desire may not be entirely
Aleema Omotoni, the award-winning British-Nigerian author of Everyone’s Thinking It, returns with Winners & Liars, a YA mystery that combines literary puzzles, family secrets, romance, and a fight over a Victorian estate. Published by HarperCollins in June 2026, the novel follows a group of ambitiou
Since 2021, we have curated lists of our favourite African book covers, and this year is no different. A book cover is often our first invitation into a story. And this year, African book covers have made that invitation impossible to ignore. From vivid illustrations to striking photography and inve
Translated from the original Arabic by Nader Aweti My mother could not protect herself from the malice of the old woman who came regularly to our house under the pretext of kinship — a kinship whose authenticity I still doubt. That woman was nothing like my grandmother. My grandmother was all tend
Before it was a book, Restful was a promise Immaculata Abba made to herself in 2017, when she decided to piece her life back together. It grew slowly and deliberately from there: a newsletter, then a curatorial Instagram page, then a radio show on Oroko Radio, then, in 2025, a full anthology carryin
Back in May, Brittle Paper covered the Masakhane African Languages Hub’s open call for the LINGUA Africa initiative, a partnership with the Gates Foundation, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, and Google.org offering up to $250,000 in grants for AI projects centered on African languages. Nearly three mont
Chika Unigwe’s short story “Miracle in Lagos Traffic” has been adapted for audio on Selected Shorts, the celebrated public radio series and podcast produced by Symphony Space, in an episode themed “Shifting Identities” and hosted by Meg Wolitzer. The story is read by actress Yetide Badaki, known for