The conversation will provide insight into contemporary developments in African writing – fiction and nonfiction - from different parts of the continent. In addition, questions surrounding the field of translation, including the reception of African literature in Germany, will be discussed.
The three invited guest speakers are Otieno Owino from Nairobi/Kenya, M. Lynx Qualey from Rabat/Morocco and Indra Wussow from Johannesburg/Südafrika.
Otieno Owino worked for four years as an Assistant Editor at the Kenyan literary publisher Kwani Trust, where he was part of the editorial teams on the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the Kwani? journal. He was Junior Editor for Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, an anthology put together by Commonwealth Writers in which he worked with renowned editor Ellah Wakatama Allfrey. His recent projects were as co-editor for SSDA’s ID anthology (2018). Otieno completed an MLitt in Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling, UK, in 2017 as a Commonwealth Scholar. He lives in Nairobi, Kenya.
M. Lynx Qualey is a critic, book editor, translator, and independent scholar who runs the ‘ArabLit’ website (www.arablit.org), which won a 2017 London Book Fair prize. She also publishes ArabLit Quarterly magazine and co-hosts the Bulaq podcast. Her translation of the middle-grade novel Ghady and Rawan, by Fatima Sharafeddine and Samar Mahfouz Barraj, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press (August 2019), and she recently won the 2019 Columbia College Literary Review Editors’ Prize Contest for her short story ‘Tell a Stranger What You Do’. M-Lynx Qualey lives in Rabat, Morocco.
Indra Wussow studied Comparative Literature and Translating in Erlangen, Germany, Berkeley, US, and Florence, Italy, and is working as a freelance curator, writer, literary translator and journalist. She is the editor of a series of contemporary African fiction called Africa Wunderhorn that ‘is regarded as pioneer work, focused on introducing contemporary African Literature to a German-speaking readership’. She has translated several works of fiction from English and Italian into German and has published literary reviews extensively in both German and South African newspapers and magazines. Her private NGO, Sylt Foundation, has connected numerous artists and writers through residencies and interdisciplinary art projects since 2004. Currently, Indra Wussow is the chief curator of the Sylt Foundation’s long-term project ‘Transformation & Identity, Trauma & Reconciliation’, that brings together writers and artists from across the globe to collaboratively re-visit national histories, transformations and the related trauma.
Indra Wussow currently lives in Johannesburg,South Africa and Yangon, Myanmar.
The event will be moderated by
Joy Chime, the Managing Editor of Wawa Book Review.
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