: African Book Festival

Melancholy hope? CA Davids’s How to Be a Revolutionary at the African Book Festival Berlin

13. September 2023 / Luise

“Politics is my first love”, she begins, and it certainly shows as the novel tracks a particular political time and feeling: one where revolutionary hopes give way to futures that fall short of expectation. It is a complex story, succinctly described by the book jacket as “connecting contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising — and refracting this globe-trotting and time-travelling through [Langston] Hughes’ confessional letters to a South African protégé about the poet’s time in Shanghai [in the 1930s]”.

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5 years of Berlin’s African Book Festival

24. August 2023 / Luise

Now in its fifth year running, taking place from 25-27 August in the Alte Münze at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, the African Book Festival Berlin, organised by the team at InterKontinental, serves as a vital platform for African literature in Berlin’s — and Germany’s — literary scene.

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“African Authors in Markets” – a panel discussion

31. August 2022 / Luise

Many of us who love literature might like to think of it as untethered from the mundane aspects of the real world, but books emerge and circulate in a literary market much like other markets, and literary value – however one might define it – is definitely not the sole determinant of what gets a book published and read.

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