Safe House: Exploring Creative Non-Fiction from Africa

Safe House – Exploring Creative Non-Fiction from Africa

The Frontline Club, London, W2 1QJ

Tuesday 31 May 2016, 19:00, £12.50/ £10 

*** Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been cancelled. On behalf of all the organisers, our apologies. All those who bought tickets will receive a refund. ***

Africa Writes is delighted to partner with Cassava Republic Press for an exploration of new African writing on the release of Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction. Published in partnership with Commonwealth Writers, the anthology brings nuanced perspectives to the stories behind the headlines, and highlights contemporary issues across the continent.

We will be joined by three of the contributors to Safe House: South African-based author Mark Gevisser, who chronicles the travails of a young, gay Ugandan man living as a refugee in Kenya; crime writer and medical immunologist Hawa Golakai, who presents the Ebola crisis as it unfolds in Liberia through a series of diary entries; and writer Kevin Eze, who reflects on the lives of Chinese migrants living in Senegal’s capital. Join us to discuss the convergence and divergence between journalism and creative non-fiction around the coverage of contemporary issues in Africa.

Kevin Eze was born in Nigeria, and studied Literature and Philosophy at the Jesuit Faculty in the Congo and Sociology at the University of Paris XII, France. His stories have appeared in Writers, Writing on Conflict and Wars in Africa, Long Journeys, and in the magazine Actu’elle. He is the author of The Peacekeeper’s Wife (Amalion Publishing, 2015). He lives and writes in Senegal.

 

 

 

Mark Gevisser is a South African whose books include A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, which won the Alan Paton Award in 2007, and Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir. His work has been published in Granta, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Observer, Foreign Affairs, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and all of South Africa’s major newspapers. He has written an award-winning documentary film, The Man Who Drove With Mandela, and worked as a heritage curator in South Africa. He co-edited the pioneering bookDefiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa in 1994 and writes frequently about LGBT politics. He is currently completing a new book on the effects of the new global LGBT rights movement.

 

Hawa Jande Golakai was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and spent her childhood in her homeland of Liberia, later living in several African countries when her family fled the civil war. Her debut novel, The Lazarus Effect is a crime thriller was nominated for several awards. The Lazarus Effect will be published in the UK by Cassava Republic Press in May. Hawa was listed by the Hay Festivals as one of the thirty-nine most promising African writers under the age of forty, and an extract from her forthcoming novel The Score appears in the Africa39 anthology published by Bloomsbury. She works as a medical immunologist and health consultant in Monrovia.

 

 

Safe House is edited by Ellah Allfrey and published by dynamic African publisher Cassava Republic Press in partnership with Commonwealth Writers.