The seventh Aké Arts and Book Festival in Lagos is all online and available for all to see. Events are free and open to the public.
PublisHer Opens Its New Initiative, With ‘Unmasked’ Interviews
The international PublisHer professional network of ‘bookwomen’ rolls out its #Unmasked series of video interviews with women in publishing.
Coronavirus Impact: Nigeria’s Aké Arts and Book Festival 2020 is Digital
The Aké Arts and Book Festival has a strong activist context for many of its 2020 events, set around the theme ‘African Time.’
‘Women at the Forefront’: Three Interviews From PublisHer at Nairobi
The second international event in the PublisHer series featured performance, discussion, and networking at the International Publishers Association’s ‘Africa Rising’ seminar in Nairobi.
Nigerian Publishers and IPA Hold First International Seminar in Lagos: Progress and Piracy
Nigeria’s first collaborative seminar with the International Publishers Association will focus on issues including a fierce battle African publishers are waging against book piracy.
At Nigeria’s New Kaduna Festival: Rolling Out a ‘Right to Write’ Project
From Nigeria’s ‘This Day’: With government, foundation, and European Union backing, a five-state literacy effort is launched at Kaduna Book & Arts Festival.
‘Betting on Africa’: A Nigerian Author’s Choice of Publisher
Having published her first novel, Dependence, with Legend in London, Sarah Ladipo Manyika turns to Abuja’s Cassava Republic for her second outing.
Can You “Bring Back the Book” to a Country That Can’t Afford to Read?
Nigeria’s President launched a campaign to inspire reading that was part-election, part-Facebook festival and part-magical thinking. Editorial by Tolu Ogunlesi LAGOS: Nigeria has no national funding for the arts, no government-run grants-awarding body to support the production of books, and no National Book Policy. In place of a proper publishing industry, the country is awash with book printers, supporting a flourishing …
Feeding the African Imagination: Nigeria’s Cassava Republic
By Belinda Otas and Tolu Ogunlesi ABUJA: Nigeria may not be the ideal place to start a publishing company, but Bibi Bakare-Yusuf and Jeremy Weate were crazy enough to take a chance. In 2006 the husband-and-wife team founded Cassava Republic, a publishing house with the goal of “feeding the African imagination” through stories taken from contemporary African life. When they …
Who Controls African Literature?
Editorial by Tolu Ogunlesi LAGOS: The literary world is once again shining a spotlight on Africa. There are new prizes: the South Africa-based PEN Studzinski Literary Award for short stories, and the Penguin Prize for African Writing, a pan-African prize covering both fiction and non-fiction genres. There’s a new book series, the “Penguin African Writers Series,” which will include not …