African Writers

The tutor on my exercise science course pointed me towards literature, and I began to read voraciously. It was the start of a love affair that led to my first novel. Mid-2012, I was trying to read a book on the physiological and…

In our series of letters from African writers, retiring journalist Jonathan Paye-Layleh reflects on his 30-year career covering the tumultuous events in his home country, Liberia. I am glad I managed to stay alive to pen these words. …

Regina Twala was an influential writer and political activist of the 50s and 60s. Yet while European men gained acclaim from her work, her name was almost erased from memory. Over the course of 2018, during a research period in the…

Locked up at 21, I discovered I was creative and could express myself through words. Now I am a poet, a broadcaster, an author – things I’d never have believed possible. It all started in 2008, when I got involved in a fight in a club…

I wrote the first draft in a ghetto in Lagos, working on it at 4am. With its publication the life I was meant to live began. Family legend has it that I began reading the Times at around the age of four. At school in London I was that…