--- Centering Africa --- The CAS Annual Lecture -We Have New Names

Date
Thu May 13th 2021, 12:00 - 1:00pm
Ellah Wakatama, Editor-at-Large for Canongate

Join CAS for the annual lecture of the year, with Ellah Wakatama, Editor-at-Large for Canongate. The title of this event is a response to NoViolet Bulawayo's Booker Prize shortlisted novel, We Need New Names. Wakatama will be exploring how new movements in genre fiction by writers from Africa and her Diaspora are providing new definitions and telling new stories about the past, present and future. The lens of this talk stems from a publisher/editor's perspective, with a focus on the meaning and impact of the works from a 'professional reader's' perspective. 

Speaker Bio

Ellah Wakatama Allfrey was born in Zimbabwe, attended college and graduate school in the U.S., and now resides in London. She is editor-at-large at Canongate Books Ltd., a senior research fellow at Manchester University (Centre for New Writing), and chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Allfrey is also a trustee of The Royal Literary Fund and the Caine Prize for African Writing, and sits on the Advisory Board for Art for Amnesty as well as on the Editorial Advisory Panel of the Johannesburg Review of Books

Allfrey edited Africa39 (2014) and the anthology Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction (2016); she is also a contributor to New Daughters of Africa (2019) and wrote the introduction to Kojo Laing’s Woman of the Aeroplanes (2012). She was made Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the publishing industry in 2011, and in 2016 was named one of New African Magazine’s “100 Most Influential Africans.”