Introducing Black: The Literary Salon – a quarterly celebration of the best in Black writing from across the world. Shifting the focus away from tokenistic representation, Black writing and writers will take centre stage, providing a platform from where they can probe more deeply into selected themes in a critical, joyous and fun way that both delight and stretch our minds.
Cassava Republic Press in partnership with A + F Creative have curated three salons featuring four voices all united by a potent theme that will be a springboard for stimulating conversation. These salons will be hosted at London’s Ace Hotel across 2020 and will provide a space dedicated to writers, readers and thinkers who are interested in and committed to uncompromising and unmediated spaces for the exploration of writing and ideas from the Black world.
Join us for the first of these salons Love and Desire Bared on February 27th, in keeping with the spirit of the month. Each writer will invite the audience to think about different forms of love and desire, and reveal the ways in which these concepts are explored in their writing. The writers confirmed for the first salon are:
Olumide Popoola, London-based Nigerian-German writer, speaker and performer, with a PhD in Creative Writing and recipient of the May Ayim Award (2004) in the category Poetry – the first Black German Literary Award. Her publications include essays, poetry, novellas and plays. Her debut novel When We Speak of Nothing was shortlisted for a Diva Literary Award, and was named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of 2017.
Irenosen Okojie, Nigerian British author whose debut novel ‘Butterfly Fish’ won a Betty Trask award and was shortlisted for an Edinburgh International First Book Award. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian, BBC and the Huffington Post amongst other publications. She was recently inducted as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as one of the Forty Under Forty initiative.
Diana Evans, Nigerian British former dancer, journalist, critic, lecturer and author, whose accolades include Orange Award for New Writers, British Book Awards deciBel Writer of the Year, shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book and the Times/Southbank Show Breakthrough awards, and long listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her third novel, Ordinary People, which was a New Yorker, New Statesman and Financial Times book of the year, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction among others, and won the South Bank Sky Arts Award.
Thursday 28 May – Exploring Maleness, Masculinity and Selfhood
Thursday 24 September – Writing stories, Making Histories
For information on tickets and line-up announcements, follow us on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook and visit the website HERE and sign up to the newsletter.
After nearly ten years in Nigeria, Cassava Republic Press – one of Africa’s leading publishers, has launched in the UK.
Our aim is to change how people think about African writing. We focus on bringing finely crafted, absorbing and nuanced narratives of every day stories to a wider audience. Launching Cassava Republic Press in the UK is an opportunity to introduce the diversity of writings coming out of Africa as well as the diaspora.
Cassava Republic Press publishes a range of fiction including Literary Fiction and Crime as well as children’s fiction, non-fiction and romance under the imprint Ankara Press.
