Ellah Allfrey, Deputy Editor of Granta magazine, leads Ghanaian author B. Kojo Laing in conversation, discussing new writing in Africa and setting the scene for the festival.

B. Kojo Laing is acknowledged as one of the great literary innovators of the past 25 years. Flamboyantly inventive, learned, ironic, whimsical, political in the widest sense, his work challenges received notions of literary technique as well as the tame demarcation ‘African literature’. This conversation will explore the author’s literary influences and his personal innovation in a discussion of the novel and the emerging narratives, from the continent and its diaspora, that give expression to the contemporary African experience.