Profiles

With his queerness and community as shield, the Somali writer is the rare artist who considers himself art. “We can be as weird and wonderful and brilliant and badass as we want to be,” he says in his first in-depth interview in eight years.

Ukamaka Olisakwe’s novels, including the latest Ogadinma, narrate womanhood in Nigeria. Last year, she started a magazine, Isele, named after her artist grandmother.

Thirteen years after he started it, his debut novel The Madhouse finally arrives. This chronicle of the ‘90s, set in northern Nigeria, broadens the familiar for the 29-year-old.

In his most recent book, The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers, the South African journalist and activist shows a world in redescription. And he has been doing that for decades, engaging power and who wields it and who is abused by it.

Inspired by anticolonialist feminist movements, the Nigerian performer set out to honour them in community-centered theatre. Her latest show is Story Story.

How Hamish Hamilton’s 24-year-old Nigerian British talent went from a historic heading of an Oxford college to editing Booker Prize winners Bernardine Evaristo and Marlon James, to broadening her diversity advocacy.

With Society of Book and Magazine Editors of Nigeria (SBMEN), two publishers, Anwuli Ojogwu of Narrative Landscape and Enajite Efemuaye, formerly of Kachifo, are laying foundation for the future.