Skip to main content

Meet the headliners – Africa Writes 2018

Africa Writes is back this summer with an exciting programme showcasing the best new writing from the continent and the diaspora. Our headline events from 29 June to 1 July highlight migration, identity and the future, and celebrate the poetic form. Meet the writers featured in the 2018 headline events and join us as we celebrate the future of African literature…

Yomi Sode

Coat
Friday 29 June, 20:00 – 21:00 (doors at 19:30), British Library
£12

BOOK NOW

Picture this:  Nigeria. A grandmother passes. London, a son cooks a pot of stew for his mother hoping to uncover hidden stories and unanswered questions.

Drawing on themes of  immigration, identity and displacement, Coat is a one-man show written by poet Yomi Sode which tells honest and emotional story of Junior. Born in Nigeria, he leaves at age 9 and heads to London, leaving behind a life that he loved and is settled in. Whilst cooking up a stew on stage, Sode confronts the difficult realities of growing up in south London as a young man, and the expectations of family, blending poetry and drama in a unique performance style rich with lyricism, humour and hard truths.

Sode is a Nigerian British writer, performer and facilitator. Shortlisted for a Jerwood Compton 2017 Poetry Fellowship, his show Coat has been programmed at the Southbank Centre and Roundhouse to sold-out audiences. Yomi is also a member of Malika Booker’s Poetry Kitchen and founder of BoxedIN, a successful monthly poetry event in BoxPark, Shoreditch.

Octavia Poetry Collective

Octavia Poetry Collective Presents:Africa Writes 2018 Party
The Year of the Womxn
Saturday 30 June, 20:00 – 00:00, Rich Mix
£10 / £8

BOOK NOW

Following 2017’s sold out R.A.P Party, Africa Writes returns with the official festival party hosted by Octavia Poetry Collective. Join us for a Wakanda-themed evening of poetry, music and dancing into the night /future where we’ll showcase and celebrate the words, the art, the song of womxn from Africa and the diaspora. Taking their name from the American science fiction writer Octavia Butler and inspiration from the $1 billion-grossing Marvel film Black Panther, Octavia present an evening celebrating The Year of the Womxn featuring art displays, a live band, DJs and a line-up of guest poets.

Led by Rachel Long, Octavia is housed at Southbank Centre and has performed at Women of the World and London Literature Festivals. Octavia Poets have also been an integral part of our Education Programme as facilitators for our program Africa Writes: Young Voices.

 

Warsan Shire

Warsan Shire in Conversation
Sunday 1 July, 17:30 – 18:45, British Library
£15 / £10

BOOK NOW

We’re delighted to welcome back Warsan Shire to Africa Writes as our headline writer. Shire is a Somali-British poet and writer based in Los Angeles. Raised in northwest London, her debut pamphlet, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (flipped eye publishing) was published in 2011. Since then, Shire was awarded the inaugural African Poetry Prize in 2013, appointed as the first Young Poet Laureate for London (2014) and selected as Poet in Resident for Queensland, Australia (2014). In 2016, her work was featured prominently in Beyonce’s visual album Lemonade. She is the first writer under 30 to headline Africa Writes.

Shire’s poetry highlights themes of migration, identity and sexuality amongst others.  She also curates and teaches classes around the intersections of art and healing. Shire will join us to discuss her work, process and inspiration.

Excited? Then head to our website to purchase your tickets, we recommend booking in advance. Look out for the full programme announcement at the end of May.

BOOK TICKETS

 



from Africa Writes https://ift.tt/2HvPLkW

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more