A discussion onstage in the 2023 Macondo Literary Festival. Image: MLF
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
The 2024 Theme: ‘The Sea Is History’
In its fourth edition Nairobi’s Macondo Literary Festival is set for September 20 to 22 at the Kenya Cultural Centre.
Drawing from the title of a poem by the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Derek Walcott, the festival’s organizers have chosen The Sea Is History for the show’s theme. The sponsor for the show is the e-learning platform eKitabu, which you may remember sponsored a rights trading program at the 2023 Nairobi International Book Fair. eKitabu’s sponsorship is credited by organizers with helping to keep ticket prices down.
Last year’s iteration of this public-facing festival emphasized literature from many of the African continent’s linguistic currents—hosting authors who write in English, Portuguese, French, and Arabi.
Chigozie Obioma
In this year’s program, linguistic influences of the Swahili coast and the Indian Ocean. The Sea Is History is a theme intended to highlight the coastline’s historical connections with other parts of Africa, connections found—according to organizers—in storytelling, art, technology, cultural memories, and society. From its inception, the Macondo Literary Festival’s anchor has been an Africa-centric survey of histories and potential futures based in literary perspectives.
Featured on the program will be the closely watched Nigerian novelist Chigozie Obioma, whose The Road to the Country was released on June 4 by Penguin Random House UK’s Hogarth unit. Obioma has been twice shortlisted by the Booker Prize for Fiction, first in 2015 for The Fishermen and then in 2019 for An Orchestra of Minorities.
A winner of the United States’ NAACP Image Award and the Los Angeles Times‘ debut fiction prize, Obioma is based in the States at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, as a professor of creative writing, and has been named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 “Leading Global Thinkers.”
Obioma’s new release is set in Lagos amid the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s, and called by his editors, “an odyssey of brotherhood, love, and unimaginable courage.”
‘Where Magical Things Happen’
At the 2023 Macondo Literary Festival. Image: MLF
The festival is staged by the nonprofit Macondo Book Society, which organizes festivals and other events promoting African authors and literature, and the name Macondo, if it’s ringing a bell for you, comes from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, “a place where magical things happen,” as the society describes it.
In its first three years, the festival a reported 59 writers and other artists from 20 nations, one of the best known of these guests being the Nobel winner Abdulrazak Gurnah. Anticipated from outside Kenya in this year’s outing are:
- MG Vassanji and Janika Oza of Canada
- Hamza Koudri of Algeria
- Shubnum Khan of South Africa
- Shubhangi Swarup of India
- Johary Ravaloson of Madagascar
- Jeferson Tenório of Brazil
- João Melo of Angola
Participating authors from Kenya are to be announced at a later date. Each doing of the festival to date has scheduled 18 sessions and three craft workshops for aspirational writers in Kenya.
A musical performance at the 2023 Macondo Literary Festival. Image: MLF
More from Publishing Perspectives about public-facing literary festivals is here, more on authors is here, more on the Kenyan market is here, and more on publishing and the book business in Africa is here.