When professional food experts from Detroit and Chicago flew to Ghana, they didn't come to teach. They came to learn the ancestral, climate-resilient agricultural secrets of Aseseeso that no elite Western culinary school could ever hope to teach. The post Decolonising gastronomy: The Ghanaian farmer
A question that sat at the heart of the Safal Kiswahili Prize for African Literature when it was founded in 2014: why were there major international prizes for African writers working in English, French, and Portuguese, but nothing comparable for creative writing in Kiswahili, one of the most widely
One of the highlights of my time in Berlin, this past month, was sharing the stage with Ben Okri for a conversation about books and the power of the imagination. The event was part of Afrolution, a festival of ideas hosted by Each One Teach One, an organization service black communities in Berlin. F
Nigerian American writer Olufunke Grace Bankole has been named the winner of the 2026 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, the prize’s twenty-fifth, for her debut novel The Edge of Water, published by Tin House in February 2025. The announcement was made on July 1, 2026. The award, administered by Virgi
On July 16, 2026, Paramount Pictures released the first official images from Children of Blood and Bone. The photos spotlight the film’s sweeping world of Orïsha and provide an early glimpse of the story’s central heroes and powerful royal figures, with elaborate costumes and production design that
Dinaw Mengestu, prominent Ethiopian American novelist who was elected president of PEN America seven months ago, has resigned from the position. The resignation came within hours of the organisation publishing a piece titled “A Silent Moratorium“ , a long-form feature based on interviews with more t
One of the highlights of my time in Berlin was sharing the stage with Ben Okri for a conversation that turned into a reading list. The event was part of Afrolution, a festival of ideas hosted by Each One Teach One, an organization service black communities in Berlin. For the last three years, the f
When Nigerian-American writer Tomi Adeyemi landed a million-dollar book and movie deal in 2017, before her debut novel had even been published, we covered it here on Brittle Paper as the genuinely historic news that it was. She was 23, a Harvard graduate, and had written a YA fantasy so rooted in Yo
Lola Shoneyin, poet, novelist, publisher, and the force behind Aké Arts and Book Festival, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She joins a society that, founded in 1820 by King George IV to “reward literary merit and excite literary talent,” now counts about 800 Fellows ele
Tired colonial tropes paint Africans as untamed, unrestrained, and lacking in intelligence. The post Racism at the World Cup is an ugly reality. How to understand where it comes from appeared first on This is Africa.