Panelist Bios
Kiprop Kimutai is a Nairobi-based writer whose fiction has appeared in Jacana, Kwani Trust, Jalada Africa, Painted Bride Quarterly, No Tokens, Kachifo, New internationalist and Acre Books.
Carey Baraka is a writer from Kisumu, Kenya. His writing about literary culture, food, and politics, among other topics, has appeared in Literary Hub, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Electric Literature, Serious Eats, Foreign Policy, Gay Magazine, among other outlets.
Khadija Bajaber has had writing published in Enkare Review, A Long House, Lolwe and Down River Road, among other publications. An associate editor for Sahifa Journal, she was, in 2018, the winner of the new Graywolf Press Africa Prize for her debut novel The House of Rust.
Dr. Lizzy Attree is the co-founder of the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature. She has a PhD from SOAS, University of London. Blood on the Page, her collection of interviews with the first African writers to write about HIV and AIDS from Zimbabwe and South Africa, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2010. She is a Director on the board of Short Story Day Africa and was the Director of the Caine Prize from 2014 to 2018.
Chinelo Onwualu is a Nigerian editor and a speculative fiction writer. She is the co-founder and previous editor-in-chief of Omenana Magazine, which publishes speculative fiction by writers from Africa and the diaspora.
Dr. Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is a Nigerian author of short fiction, poetry, and children’s fiction, and he currently works as an assistant professor of English at the University of Calgary. His academic research draws from gender studies and critical race theory to analyze African, African diaspora, postcolonial, and global literatures.
Helon Habila Ngalabak is a Nigerian novelist and poet whose writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize, the Commonweath Writers Prize for the African region, the Emily Balch Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. He is a professor at George Mason University.
Dela Gwala is a feminist facilitator, researcher, creative chameleon and a multidisciplinary storyteller. Her writing has been published in three books: Our Ghosts Were Once People, Feminism Is, and This is How it is. Dela is currently working on a documentary about an ocean scientist who is also a Sangoma.
Nelson Rolon is a Black Hispanic writer based in Ohio. His debut novelette, Saudade, was published in FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, reprinted in Lightspeed Magazine, and mentioned in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2019.
Moderator Bridget Pitt is a South African author and environmental activist who has published poetry, short fiction, non-fiction and four novels, including her most recent historical fiction work, Eye Brother Horn. Her work has been long-listed for the Sunday Times Literary Awards, the Commonwealth Book Prize, and the Wole Soyinka African Literature Award.
Hannes Barnard is a South African-born author of both English and Afrikaans novels. He debuted in 2019 with the YA novel, Halley se komeet, which he translated into English as Halley’s Comet. In 2020, Wolk, his apocalyptic YA adventure, was released, and coming up in 2022 is his crime novel, die wet van Gauteng. When not writing, traveling, or planning his next adventure, Hannes works in marketing. He has called England and Seychelles home but now lives in Johannesburg with his wife.
Tina Kover is the translator of over thirty books from French. Her work has won the Albertine Prize, the French Voices Award, and the Lambda Literary Award, and has been shortlisted for the (U.S.) National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the Scott Moncrieff Prize. Tina leads literary translation workshops for the American Literary Translators Association and masterclasses in literary translation for Durham University. She is also the co-founder of Translators Aloud, a YouTube channel that features literary translators reading from their own work.
Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer and editor who runs the Radical Books Collective and is the founding editor of Warscapes online magazine. In 2016, she edited Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan which brought together 20 stories from the warring countries.
Raphael Thierry is a literary agent and founder of Ægitna Literary Agency, which is dedicated to world literature and targets unconventional fiction and non-fiction publications and translations. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Lorraine (France) and of the University of Yaounde I (Cameroon).
