Nigerian Canadian poet Ayomide Bayowa discusses the influences behind his latest poetry collection.
Reading List
Authors write about the texts that they read, engaged with, while researching and writing their book.
American civil rights activist George Houser was also active in Africa’s anti-colonial struggle. To write his biography, Sheila Collins widely read 20th century African political history.
While editing a collection of the writings of South African feminist Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell found inspiration in texts that reflected Ngcobo’s sense that writing is an exercise of freedom.
Instead of listing the books that help her write 'Written Out: The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala,' the author notes five books that shaped Regina Gelana Twala.
The author reflects on books that offer a long-historical perspective on African literature and history.
The author of 'Now You Know How Mapetla Died,' a book on the murder of a leading Black Consciousness leader, writes about her research.
Anyone who has attempted to describe dance in writing knows how difficult it is. These books on dance on the continent and the diaspora gets close.
On the publication of his book on black life on the margins, the South African author reflects on work that expand the meaning of being black on the world.
The author of 'Decolonize Museums' assembles a list of essential reading on the past, present and future of museums.
The award-winning South African author Melinda Ferguson takes us through a selection of books exploring freedom, death, truth, as well as psychedelics, which can be a route to pondering such big questions.
The author writes about books whose true power comes from excavating the perennial endemic diseases that never leave our sight.
The author’s new book wants to clear away some of the misunderstandings that dog Africa and China relations. Here, he catalogs the books that guided him.
The books that the author, a Cameroonian novelist, has been reading share an ethics of political engagement, a quest for identity and cultural inventory, and an ear for the voices and harmonies of African languages.
Writer Ari Gautier owes his own blend of mythology, Dalit consciousness, and surrealism to literary stylists such as Amos Tutuola, Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.
The novelist on 3 books he returns to: by Wole Soyinka, Ibn Khaldun, and a third on the history and the system of writing of an early 20th-century Cameroonian king.
What happens to the contemporary explosion of moral panics, urban legends, and other paranoid narratives when they manifest in a place like South Africa?
To address a difficult and traumatic subject like Ebola, the writer Véronique Tadjo turned to oral literature for inspiration.
On telling stories through the evocative and varied moments in which humans live, rather than through the predictable and artificial plots historians devise.
Livermon’s new book explores how South African kwaito artists, Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza, pushed against the boundaries of gender and performance in their music.
Media scholar Cara Moyer-Duncan wrote a book about postapartheid South Africa. Here she gives her book picks for our #ReadingList series.