Sue Monk Kidd is an American writer from Sylvester, Georgia best known for her novels The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings.
Margo Lillian Jefferson is an American writer and academic.
Lawrence Osborne is a British novelist and journalist who is currently residing in Bangkok. Osborne was educated at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and at Harvard University, and has since led a nomadic life, residing for years in Poland, France, Italy, Morocco, the United States, Mexico, Thailand, and Istanbul.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
Jenn Ashworth is an English writer born in 1982 in Preston, Lancashire. In June 2018 Ashworth was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.
Nadifa Mohamed is a Somali-British novelist. She featured on Granta magazine's list "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2013, and in 2014 on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. Her 2021 novel, The Fortune Men, was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, making her the first British Somali novelist to get this honour. She has also written short stories, essays, memoirs and articles in outlets including The Guardian, and contributed poetry to the anthology New Daughters of Africa. Mohamed was also a lecturer in Creative Writing in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London until 2021. She will be Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University in Spring 2022.
Black Mamba Boy is a 2010 novel by the Somali-British author Nadifa Mohamed.
Talitha Stevenson is an author and journalist, born 1977, who grew up in West London.
Monique Roffey is a Trinidadian-born British writer and memoirist. Her novels have been much acclaimed, winning awards including the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for Archipelago, and the Costa Book of the Year award, for The Mermaid of Black Conch in 2021.
Warsan Shire is a British writer, poet, editor and teacher, who was born to Somali parents in Kenya. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize, chosen from a shortlist of six candidates out of a total 655 entries. Her words "No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark", from the poem "Conversations about Home ", have been called "a rallying call for refugees and their advocates".
The Wheatsheaf is a pub in Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia, London, that was popular with London's bohemian set in the 1930s. Its customers included George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Muir and Humphrey Jennings, who were known for a while as the Wheatsheaf writers Other habitués included the singer and dancer Betty May, and the writer and surrealist poet Philip O'Connor, Nina Hamnett, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Anthony Carson and Quentin Crisp.
Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present is a compilation of orature and literature by more than 200 women from Africa and the African diaspora, edited and introduced by Margaret Busby, who compared the process of assembling the volume to "trying to catch a flowing river in a calabash".
The Wish Maker is the first novel by Pakistani author Ali Sethi. Published in 2009 by Riverhead Books, it tells the story of Zaki Shirazi, a young boy from United States who returned to Lahore, Pakistan after finishing his studies to celebrate the wedding of his childhood friend Samar Api and observe a completely new Pakistan. The story is set against the backdrop of tumultuous events, from the Zia-ul-Haq reign to Zulfiqar Bhutto's execution and Benazir Bhutto elections, it also dictates United States help to Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.
The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest is a 2002 book by Aminatta Forna about her childhood and an investigation into the execution of her father, Mohamed Forna. It was serialised as a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 and was runner-up for the 2003 Samuel Johnson Prize.
Ancestor Stones is a 2006 novel by Aminatta Forna about the experiences of four women in a polygamous family in West Africa.
The Hired Man is a 2013 novel by Aminatta Forna about an Englishwoman, Laura, and her two children who renovate a farmhouse in Croatia with the help of local handyman, Duro and the revealing of the recent history of the area.
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.
The Leavers is Lisa Ko's first novel, published on May 2, 2017.
The Old Drift is a 2019 historical fiction and Science fiction novel by Zambian author Namwali Serpell. Set in Rhodesia/Zambia, it is Serpell's debut novel and follows the lives of three interwoven families in three generations. It won the 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award as well as the Arthur C. Clarke Award
The Fortune Men is a 2021 novel by the Somali-British author Nadifa Mohamed, published on 27 May 2021, by the Viking Books imprint of Penguin General.
