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“I needed to write something that takes advantage of the rich nuances in my own culture,” said the Graywolf Press Africa Prize-winning author of The House of Rust.

For the Nigerian novelist, women’s lives are the plot. With Tomorrow I Become a Woman and We Were Girls Once, the first two books in a planned cross-generational trilogy, she takes us into the burdens of marriage, motherhood, ethnicity, and class.

Centred on his former Ibadan residence, family memories of a young militant Wole Soyinka casts strange light on his increasingly contentious legacy as an activist.

Having traversed regions, her poetry, including the Forward Prize-winning Bad Diaspora Poems, interrogates a race- and class-conscious world — and her place in it as a Muslim Somali woman.

In Exodus, his debut collection, ‘Gbenga Adeoba threads the histories, migrations, and traumas of people forced to sea.

From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, and Leila Aboulela to DK Nnuro, Momtaza Mehri, and Fatin Abbas: the notable books of 2023 by Africans.

In their debut novel-in-stories Vagabonds!, the Nigerian writer and visual artist pursues an alternate reality of their mind, taking on, among other subjects, social normalcy, gender, and queerness.

The Ghanaian American author of What Napoleon Could Not Do, a summer reading pick by Barack Obama, has been thinking about art in our contemporary times.

Headlined by a quartet of feted veteran voices in Wole Soyinka, Aminatta Forna, Jennifer Makumbi, and Chris Abani, NYU Accra’s 30-author symposium is a convergence of inspiration. “We have to tell our own story,” said convener and school director Chike Frankie Edozien.

How to Write About Africa gathers vivid, powerful essays and fiction by the late Kenyan icon. Its editor Achal Prabhala talks compiling it, a second posthumous book, and an uncompleted novel. “Much is made of what he did for other writers, but it was his own writing that did it for me,” he said.

Chidi Mokeme and Nse Ikpe-Etim were snubbed in a near shut-out of Netflix series Shanty Town, with Tobi Bakre scooping a shock Best Drama Actor victory as Brotherhood swept its categories. Perennial Best Comedy Actress champ Funke Akindele also lost for the first time in five years while Anikulapo won Best Overall Movie.

Since she erupted in The Meeting, playing against type as a hilariously antagonistic receptionist, the superstar has embodied complex women, including a soldier’s wife in ’76 and a bewitching singer in La Femme Anjola. Now, 25 years into her career, she is Nollywood’s most critically acclaimed actor, and Open Country Mag‘s first film cover star. Where does she draw from to inhabit these women?

From Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ben Okri, and Leila Aboulela, to Chigozie Obioma, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, and Ayobami Adebayo, here are the over 100 books expected to lead the literary conversation this year.

From Warsan Shire, Romeo Oriogun, and Safia Elhillo to Arinze Ifeakandu, Akwaeke Emezi, NoViolet Bulawayo, and Chinelo Okparanta: our second annual highlight of the top titles of the year by African writers.

With Happiness, Like Water and Under the Udala Trees, she helped herald LGBTQ visibility in Nigerian literature. With Harry Sylvester Bird, she still isn’t looking to satisfy society. “I think, sometimes, it takes time for people to digest what literature is really doing,” the literary icon says.