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Africa Writes
The Royal African Society (RAS) of the United Kingdom was founded in 1901 to promote relations between the United Kingdom and countries in Africa. The RAS is a not-for-profit membership organisation based in London. In addition to producing its journal ''African Affairs'', formerly ''Journal of the African Society''), the RAS runs programmes in business, politics, the arts and education. In 2012, the society launched the Africa Writes festival, presented in partnership with the British Library, and now the UK's most prominent celebration of contemporary literature from Africa and the diaspora. History The establishment of the society in 1901 grew out of the travels of Mary Kingsley, an English writer and explorer who travelled to Africa several times in the 1890s and greatly influenced European study of the African continent. In 1893, she travelled to Luanda, Angola, where she lived with the indigenous peoples to learn their customs. In 1895 she returned to study cannibal tribes, tr ...
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Margaret Busby
Margaret Yvonne Busby, , Hon. FRSL (born 1944), also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisherJazzmine Breary"Let's not forget" in ''Writing the Future: Black and Asian Writers and Publishers in the UK Market Place'', Spread the Word, April 2013, p. 30. when she and Clive Allison (1944–2011) co-founded Margaret Busby"Clive Allison obituary" ''The Guardian'', 3 August 2011. the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby (A & B) in the 1960s. She edited the anthology ''Daughters of Africa'' (1992), and its 2019 follow-up ''New Daughters of Africa''. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature.Natasha Onwuemezi"Busby to compile anthology of African women writers" ''The Bookseller'', 15 December 2017. In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons".
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Zed Books
Zed Books is an independent non-fiction publishing company based in London, UK. It was founded in 1977 under the name Zed Press by Roger van Zwanenberg. Zed publishes books for an international audience of both general and academic readers, covering areas such as politics and global current affairs, economics, gender studies and sexualities, development studies and the environment. Zed today Zed Books' business model and structure are unique to the publishing industry. It is the world's largest English-language publishing collective. The company is owned and managed as a non-hierarchical co-operative by its workers, without any shareholders. It publishes around 70 books per year, providing many to the academic market and to university courses. In 2019, Zed received the Independent Publishers Guild Alison Morrison Diversity Award. In March 2020, it was announced that "certain assets of Zed Books Limited" had been acquired by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. and that Zed would opera ...
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Birmingham
Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the West Midlands metropolitan county, and approximately 4.3 million in the wider metropolitan area. It is the largest UK metropolitan area outside of London. Birmingham is known as the second city of the United Kingdom. Located in the West Midlands region of England, approximately from London, Birmingham is considered to be the social, cultural, financial and commercial centre of the Midlands. Distinctively, Birmingham only has small rivers flowing through it, mainly the River Tame and its tributaries River Rea and River Cole – one of the closest main rivers is the Severn, approximately west of the city centre. Historically a market town in Warwickshire in the medieval period, Birmingham grew during the 18th century during the Midla ...
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Swindon
Swindon () is a town and unitary authority with Borough status in the United Kingdom, borough status in Wiltshire, England. As of the 2021 Census, the population of Swindon was 201,669, making it the largest town in the county. The Swindon unitary authority area had a population of 233,410 as of 2021. Located in South West England, the town lies between Bristol, 35 miles (56 kilometres) to its west, and Reading, Berkshire, Reading, equidistant to its east. Recorded in the 1086 Domesday Book as ''Suindune'', it was a small market town until the mid-19th century, when it was selected as the principal site for the Great Western Railway's repair and maintenance Swindon Works, works, leading to a marked increase in its population. The new town constructed for the railway workers produced forward-looking amenities such as the UK’s first lending library and a ‘cradle-to-grave' health care centre that was later used as a blueprint for the National Health Service, NHS. After the W ...
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Leeds
Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by population) in England, after London and Birmingham. The city was a small manorial borough in the 13th century and a market town in the 16th century. It expanded by becoming a major production centre, including of carbonated water where it was invented in the 1760s, and trading centre (mainly with wool) for the 17th and 18th centuries. It was a major mill town during the Industrial Revolution. It was also known for its flax industry, iron foundries, engineering and printing, as well as shopping, with several surviving Victorian era arcades, such as Kirkgate Market. City status was awarded in 1893, a populous urban centre formed in the following century which absorbed surrounding villages and overtook the nearby York population. It is locate ...
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Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is a Ghanaian feminist writer and blogger. She co-founded award-winning blog ''Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women'' and has written for ''The Guardian'' and ''Open Democracy''. Sekyiamah is the Director for Communications manager at the Association for Women's Rights in Development and a member of the Black Feminism Forum Working Group which organised the historic first Black Feminist Forum in Bahia, Brazil. Life Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah was born in London, England, to Ghanaian parents, and grew up in Ghana. She has a diploma in performance coaching and a certificate in conflict mediation and has worked as a life coach and a public speaker. She was also awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in communications and cultural studies by the University of North London and a Master of Science degree in gender and development from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has also worked as a leadership trainer for London's Metropolitan Po ...
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Mona Eltahawy
Mona Eltahawy ( ar, منى الطحاوى, ; born August 1, 1967) is a freelance Egyptian-American journalist and social commentator based in New York City. She has written essays and op-eds for publications worldwide on Egypt and the Islamic world, on topics including women's rights, patriarchy, and Muslim political and social affairs. Her work has appeared in ''The Washington Post'', ''The New York Times'', ''Christian Science Monitor'', and the ''Miami Herald'' among others. ''Headscarves and Hymens'', Eltahawy's first book, was published in May 2015. Eltahawy has been a guest analyst on U.S. radio and television news shows. She is among people who spearheaded the Mosque Me Too movement by using the hashtag #MosqueMeToo. Eltahawy has spoken publicly at universities, panel discussions and interfaith gatherings on human rights and reform in the Islamic world, feminism and Egyptian Muslim–Christian relations, among other concerns. Early life Eltahawy was born in Port Said, Egy ...
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Chigozie Obioma
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) is a Nigerian writer. He is best known for writing the novels ''The Fishermen'' (2015) and ''An Orchestra of Minorities'' (2019), both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize in their respective years of publication. His work has been translated into more than 25 languages. , Obioma is James E. Ryan Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Early life and influences Of Igbo descent, Obioma was born in 1986 into a family of 12 children — seven brothers and four sisters – in Akure, in the south-western part of Nigeria, where he grew up speaking Yoruba, Igbo, and English. As a child, he was fascinated by Greek myths and British writers, including Shakespeare, John Milton, and John Bunyan. Among African writers, he developed a strong affinity for Wole Soyinka's ''The Trials of Brother Jero''; Cyprian Ekwensi's ''An African Night's Entertainment''; Camara Laye's ''The African Child''; and D. O. Fagunwa's '' Ògbà ...
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Alain Mabanckou
Alain Mabanckou (born 24 February 1966) is a novelist, journalist, poet, and academic, a French citizen born in the Republic of the Congo, he is currently a Professor of Literature at UCLA. He is best known for his novels and non-fiction writing depicting the experience of contemporary Africa and the African diaspora in France."Alain Mabanckou, l'enfant noir"
"G.L.", ''Le Nouvel Observateur'', 19 August 2010.
He is among the best known and most successful writers in the ,
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Nawal El Saadawi
Nawal El Saadawi ( ar, نوال السعداوي, , 22 October 1931 – 21 March 2021) was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist and physician. She wrote many books on the subject of women in Islam, paying particular attention to the practice of female genital mutilation in her society. She was described as "the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab World", and as "Egypt's most radical woman". She was founder and president of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and co-founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights. She was awarded honorary degrees on three continents. In 2004, she won the North–South Prize from the Council of Europe. In 2005, she won the Inana International Prize in Belgium,"PEN World Voices Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture by Nawal El Saadawi"
YouTube. 8 ...
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Ben Okri
Ben Okri (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian-British poet and novelist.Ben Okri"
British Council, ''Writers Directory''. .
Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the and traditions,"Ben Okri"
Editors, ''The Guardian'', 22 July 2008.
Stefaan Anrys

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Ama Ata Aidoo
Ama Ata Aidoo, ''née'' Christina Ama Aidoo (born 23 March 1942) is a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright and academic. She was the Minister of Education under the Jerry Rawlings administration. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation to promote and support the work of African women writers. Early life Aidoo was born on 23 March 1942 in Saltpond in the Central Region of Ghana. Some sources including Megan Behrent, Brown University, and ''Africa Who's Who'' have stated that she was born on 31 March 1940. She had a twin brother, Kwame Ata. She was raised in a Fante royal household, the daughter of Nana Yaw Fama, chief of Abeadzi Kyiakor, and Maame Abasema. She grew up at a time of resurgent British neocolonialism that was taking place in her homeland. Her grandfather was murdered by neocolonialists, which brought her father's attention to the importance of educating the children and families of the village on the history and events of the era. This led him to open up the ...
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