Romesh Gunesekera FRSL is a Sri Lankan-born British author, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel Reef in 1994. He has judged a number of literary prizes and was Chair of the judges of Commonwealth Short Story Prize competition for 2015.
Kwani? is a prominent African literary magazine headquartered in Kenya. It has been hailed as "undoubtedly the most influential journal to have emerged from sub-Saharan Africa".
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Helon Habila Ngalabak is a Nigerian novelist and poet, whose writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize in 2001. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before moving in 2002 to England, where he was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia, and now teaches creative writing at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
Uwem Akpan is a Nigerian writer. He is known as the author of Say You're One of Them (2008), a collection of five stories published by Little, Brown & Company. His debut book achieved international success.
Henrietta Rose-Innes is a South African novelist and short-story writer. She was the 2008 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing for her speculative-fiction story "Poison". Her novel Nineveh was shortlisted for the 2012 Sunday Times Prize for Fiction and the M-Net Literary Awards. In September of that year her story "Sanctuary" was awarded second place in the 2012 BBC (Inter)national Short Story Award.
FEMRITE – Uganda Women Writers' Association, founded in 1995, is an NGO based in Kampala, Uganda, whose programmes focus on developing and publishing women writers in Uganda and—more recently—in the East African region. FEMRITE has likewise expanded its concerns to East African issues regarding the environment, literacy, education, health, women's rights and good governance.
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 series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.
Tropical Fish is a short story collection, published in 2005, by Ugandan author Doreen Baingana. It revolves around the lives of a family based in Entebbe, Uganda. It follows Christine, Patti and Rosa the daughters of a relatively well off family whose father, a senior government official, becomes an alcoholic and loses everything starting with his job. Through it all the mother has to support her family on her own. It follows the lives of the three sisters. It touches religious influence in Africa, boarding school life in missionary schools, first love, superstition, inevitably AIDS, love across the colour with a sugar daddy syndrome, the sense of alienation that comes with migrating to another country (USA) and that of displacement after coming back home. Rosa, the eldest sister, was promiscuous, she died of AIDS. Patti the middle sister, turned into a born-again Christian. And Christine the youngest went to Los Angeles, came back eight years later to pick up a job amidst the struggles of discovering her inner self.
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".
Elnathan John is a Nigerian novelist, satirist and lawyer whose stories have twice been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing.
Meri Nana-Ama Danquah is a Ghanaian-American writer, editor, journalist and public speaker, whose name at birth was Mildred Mary Nana-Ama Boakyewaa Brobby. She is best known for her 1998 memoir Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression. Her short story "When a Man Loves a Woman" was shortlisted for the 2022 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing.
Mitchell S. Jackson is an American writer. He is the author of the 2013 novel The Residue Years, as well as Oversoul (2012), an ebook collection of essays and short stories. Jackson is a Whiting Award recipient and a former winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In 2021, while an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for his profile of Ahmaud Arbery for Runner's World. As of 2021, Jackson is the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
Lesley Nneka Arimah is a Nigerian writer. She has been described as "a skillful storyteller who can render entire relationships with just a few lines of dialogue" and "a new voice with certain staying power." She is the winner of the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa, the 2017 O. Henry Prize, the 2017 Kirkus Prize, and the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing.
Rachida el-Charni is a Tunisian writer. She has published three collections of short stories and one novel. Her short story 'Street of the House of Wonders' was in Habila Helon's The Granta Book of the African Short Story - a collection of short stories from prominent African writers, including Chimamanda Adichie, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Doreen Baingana, Henrietta Rose-Innes, E. C. Osondu, Alex La Guma and Camara Laye among others.
Troy Onyango is a Kenyan writer, editor and lawyer. His work has appeared in journals and magazines including Prairie Schooner, Wasafiri, Caine Prize Anthology, Brittle Paper, and Transition Magazine issue 121, for which his short story "The Transfiguration" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His short story "For What Are Butterflies Without Their Wings" won the fiction prize for the inaugural Nyanza Literary Festival (NALIF) Prize.
The Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship, also called the Morland Writing Scholarships or the MilesMorland Writing Scholarship is an annual financial scholarship awarded to four to six African writers to enable them write a fiction or non-fiction book in the English language.
Meron Hadero is an Ethiopian-American writer. She is known for her debut collection, A Down home meal for these difficult times published in 2022 by Restless Books.
