Ghana

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.

In two acclaimed and bestselling novels, the British Ghanaian writer and photographer has enlarged his terrain from love and art to family and memory. “I wanted to take my sentences past this thing of knowledge and more toward feeling,” he said. “It feels like a progression in the questions I’m asking, specifically around identity and Blackness, but, really, around love.”

As the first published African female playwright and Ghana’s former Minister of Education, the author of No Sweetness Here and Our Sister Killjoy was admired by Chimamanda Adichie, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and popstar Burna Boy. “The decay of Africa’s social, political, and economic systems is directly related to the complete marginalization of women,” she once said.

The Teller of Secrets, originally published in Nigeria as Of Women and Frogs, and Daughters in Exile were acquired in a 6-figure deal.

The story, moving from Ghana to Spain, has been called “a stunning testament to the strength of the human spirit.”

The Ethiopian novelist’s event is themed “Forgotten Heroines & Tomorrow’s Sheroes.”

The Ghanaian poet’s debut collection has spurred comparison to “folk poets like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.”

The selections, says the chair of judges Bernardine Evaristo, are “gloriously varied and thematically rich . . . and grapple with society’s big issues expressed through thrilling storytelling.”

It is an “unsettling tale of murder in a country whose dead slaves are shackled with stories that must be heard.”