Tsitsi Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker. Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), which was the first to be published in English by a Black woman from Zimbabwe, was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world. She has won other literary honours, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the PEN Pinter Prize. In 2020, her novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2022, Dangarembga was convicted in a Zimbabwe court of inciting public violence, by displaying, on a public road, a placard asking for reform.
Michael Crummey is a Canadian poet and a writer of historical fiction. His writing often draws on the history and landscape of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Marina Endicott is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. Her novel Good to a Fault won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Canada and the Caribbean and was a finalist for the Giller Prize. Her next, The Little Shadows, was longlisted for the Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award. Close to Hugh was longlisted for the Giller Prize and named one of CBC's Best Books of 2015. The Difference won the City of Edmonton Robert Kroetsch Prize. It was published in the US by W. W. Norton as The Voyage of the Morning Light in June 2020.
Heather O'Neill is a Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist, who published her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, in 2006. The novel was subsequently selected for the 2007 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by singer-songwriter John K. Samson. Lullabies won the competition. The book also won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for eight other major awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Governor General's Award and was longlisted for International Dublin Literary Award.
Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese-born British author, filmmaker and academic. Her writing and films explore migration, alienation, memory, personal journeys, feminism, translation and transnational identities.
Sushma Joshi is a Nepali writer, filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Her fiction and non-fiction deal with Nepal's civil conflict, as well as stories of globalization, migration and diaspora.
The emerging film industry in Uganda is known as Ugawood or sometimes Kinauganda by the locals. The 2005 production Feelings Struggle directed by Ashraf Ssemwogerere is credited with being the first Ugawood film. Many have asserted that this steadily growing film industry is derived from Hollywood, in the same manner as Nollywood and Bollywood. In a story that ran in a local newspaper in Uganda about the naming of the industry, filmmakers Kuddzu Isaac, Matt Bish and Usama Mukwaya were quoted as saying that Ugawood would be the most appropriate name for the industry.
Maria Joan Hyland is an ex-lawyer and the author of three novels: How the Light Gets In (2004), Carry Me Down (2006) and This is How (2009). Hyland is a lecturer in creative writing in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Carry Me Down (2006) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Hawthornden Prize and the Encore Prize.
Doreen Baingana is a Ugandan writer. Her short story collection, Tropical Fish, won the Grace Paley Award for Short Fiction in 2003 and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book, Africa Region in 2006. Stories in it were finalists for the Caine Prize in 2004 and 2005. She was a Caine Prize finalist for the third time in 2021 and has received many other awards listed below.
Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva is a Ugandan writer, poet, actress, literary activist, and biographer. She is the founder of the Babishai Niwe (BN) Poetry Foundation formerly The Beverley Nambozo Poetry Award for Ugandan women, which began in 2008 as a platform for promoting poetry. It has since grown to include all African poets and runs as an annual poetry award. In 2014, the award will extend to the entire continent, targeting both men and women. The same year, the foundation will also publish an anthology of poetry from poets of Africa. She is also the founder of the Babishai Niwe Women's Leadership Academy. Nambozo joined the Crossing Borders Scheme British Council Uganda in 2003 under the short stories genre. She was nominated for the August 2009 Arts Press Association (APA) Awards for revitalising poetry in Uganda after initiating the Beverley Nambozo Poetry Award, the first poetry award for Ugandan women.
Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL, is the Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University, and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was the Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, she was the senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and an assistant editor at Penguin. She is the series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan-British novelist and short story writer. Her doctoral novel, The Kintu Saga, was shortlisted and won the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013. It was published by Kwani Trust in 2014 under the title Kintu. Her short story collection, Manchester Happened, was published in 2019. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story "Let's Tell This Story Properly", and emerged Regional Winner, Africa region. She was the Overall Winner of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She was longlisted for the 2014 Etisalat Prize for Literature. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. In 2018, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in the fiction category. In 2021, her novel The First Woman won the Jhalak Prize.
The Felistas Fable is a 2013 Ugandan film written, directed and produced by Dilman Dila. The film stars Veronica Namanda, Mike Wawuyo, Kaddzu Isaac and Mathew Nabwiso.
Nyana Kakoma is a Ugandan writer, editor, blogger, and publisher from Kampala. She created the online platform Sooo Many Stories that promotes Ugandan literature. She formerly wrote under her maiden name Hellen Nyana. She is one of the facilitators of Writivism in Kampala 2015. She took part in "Bremen & Kampala – Spaces of Transcultural Writing", a collaboration between writers from Uganda and Bremen. She is a member of Femrite. In February 2015, she was awarded an editorial fellowship at Modjaji Books by the African Writers Trust and Commonwealth Writers. A number of her articles have appeared in newspapers. She attended the Caine Prize workshop 2013, and her story "Chief Mourner" was published in the Caine Prize anthology A Memory This Size and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2013.
Ber Anena born and previously published as Harriet Anena is a Ugandan writer and performer, whose writing includes poetry, nonfiction and fiction. She is the author of a collection of poems, A Nation In Labour, published in 2015, won the 2018 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. The Economist described her poetry performance as "an arresting evocation of love and war".
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is a Zimbabwe-born writer and professor of creative writing. She is the author of Shadows, a novella, and House of Stone, a novel.
Imachibundu Oluwadara Onuzo is a Nigerian novelist. Her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter, won a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature.
Yvvette Edwards FRSL is a British novelist born in London, England, of Caribbean heritage. Her first novel, A Cupboard Full of Coats, was published in 2011 to much acclaim and prize nominations that included the Man Booker Prize longlist and the Commonwealth Book Prize shortlist. Edwards followed this debut work five years later with The Mother (2016), a novel that "reinforces her accomplishment". She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora is a 2020 speculative fiction anthology edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Zelda Knight. It contains thirteen works of short fiction, and a foreword by Tananarive Due. It was first published by Aurelia Leo in 2020.
Africanfuturism: An Anthology is an Africanfuturism anthology edited by Nigerian author Wole Talabi. It contains eight works of short fiction, plus an introduction written by Talabi. It was published by Brittle Paper in October 2020.
