10 Afropolitan Writers You Should Know
These novelists explore complex themes of African identity.
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10 Afropolitan Writers You Should Know - The immigrant experience is a complex one, intricately bound to tangled issues of race, class, identity and more. The New York Times recently highlighted a new wave of African writers with a multicontinental, “Afropolitan" leaning, most of whom have lived through the same transplants as their characters. We’ve compiled a list of emerging and established authors whose work expands on the difficulties, diversity and beauty of the sprawling African diaspora. — Patrice Peck(Photos from Left: Courtesy Pan Foundation, Ulf Andersen/Getty Images, Ishara S.KODIKARA/AFP/Getty Images)
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Dinaw Mengestu - Ethiopian-born novelist Dinaw Mengestu has published three novels throughout his illustrious career: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears in 2007, How to Read the Air in 2010 and All Our Names in 2014. Having immigrated to the U.S. at 2 and grown up in Illinois, Mengestu told The New York Times that he saw “a thread” among the African writers examining internationalism. “There’s this investigation of what happens to the dislocated soul,” he said. (Photo: David Levenson/Getty Images)
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - The career of Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reached astronomical heights these past few years. Her latest novel Americanah, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, centers on a pair of Nigerian lovers whose adventures take them from Nigeria to Britain to America. "Race is such a strange construct,” Adichie told NPR "because you have to learn what it means to be black in America.”(Photo: David Levenson/Getty Images)
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Helen Oyeyemi - A child literary star, Nigeria-born and Britain-bred Helen Oyeyemi wrote her first book at 18 and released Boy, Snow, Bird, her fifth book set in 1950s New England, in March 2014. In an interview with The Guardian, Oyeyemi rejected the widely-held notion that her books were about migration and the need to belong: “People get a bit excited if there's a black person and say, 'Oh this is about that thing' when actually it's about expanding the genre of haunted house stories."(Photo: Courtesy of Pan Macmillan)
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NoViolet Bulawayo - The first Black African woman and Zimbabwean to be shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, NoViolet Bulawayo made a splash with her debut novel We Need New Names. "Being an immigrant myself, and having met a lot of immigrants, I'm struck by this experience of transition, something that can be hard to the extent of affecting your relationship to the new country,” said Bulawayo in an interview.(Photo: Anthony Devlin-WPA Pool/Getty Images)
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Teju Cole - In his acclaimed 2012 novel Open City, Nigerian-born, American-raised author Teju Cole focuses on Julius, a fellow (fictional) Nigerian expatriate who makes a number of self-discoveries in New York City and Belgium. “There's a little drop of something else in my version of American-ness; I think that's a story worth telling,” Cole told NPR.(Photo: EPA/TONI GARRIGA/LANDOV)
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Taiye Selasi - A writer of Nigerian and Ghanaian descent, Taiye Selasi was born in London, raised in Boston, educated at Yale and Oxford University and currently spends her time in New York City, Rome and New Delhi. Her multifaceted background and upbringing mirrors the storyline of her debut novel Ghana Must Go. "I describe myself as Afropolitan to suggest perhaps a more complicated African identity than the ones available to my parents’ generation,” Selasi told The Globe and Mail.(Photo: Purushottam Diwakar/India Today Group/Getty Images)
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Olufemi Terry - Previously a journalist in Somalia and Uganda, writer Olufemi Terry won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2010 for his Homeric short story “Stickfighting Days.” The Sierra Leone native grew up in Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the Côte d’Ivoire and received education in New York and Cape Town. While he writes about the African diaspora, Terry believes that it is “unhelpful” to see writers from the continent as a distinct category.(Photo: Olufemi Terry via Twitter)
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Aminatta Forna - Sierra Leonean-Scottish novelist Aminatta Forna constantly grapples with identity and memory as seen in both her memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water and her three novels, Ancestors Stones, The Memory of Love and The Hired Man. “People used to ask where the African writers were,” said Aminatta Forna in regards to publishers’ recent interest in African writers. “They were cleaning offices and working as clerks.”(Photo: Alpha/Landov)
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Kabelo “Sello” Duiker - Prior to committing suicide in 2005, South African novelist Kabelo “Sello” Duiker won the Common Wealth Writers’ Prize for Thirteen Cents and the 2002 Herman Charles Bosman Prize for his second novel, The Quiet Violence of Dreams. The latter novel looked at how young South Africans adopt and repackage global culture while worrying about selling out. “Isn’t sticking to your own culture ruthlessly a kind of stagnation, a type of incest?” the protagonist asks.(Photo: Courtesy of NB Publishers)