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2 weeks ago | 
brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro
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3 weeks ago | 
brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro
“Writing my latest book, Dream Count, made me think about clothes again,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote recently in an Elle.com feature. The sentence is quiet and personal, but it offers a useful lens on her appearance at the 2025 Met Gala. Adichie’s red carpet moment is being widely read as a fashion debut, but it is just as much a literary one.
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3 weeks ago | 
brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro
British-Sudanese-Ghanaian fantasy author Saara El-Arifi is a major voice in the speculative fiction space. Her debut novel, The Final Strife (2022) is an epic fantasy, drawing inspiration from African and Arabian mythology. Her latest work, Faebound (2024) is a shift into the hot new genre of Romantasy, a hybrid of romance and fantasy that has exploded in visibility thanks to titles like Fourth Wing and A Court of Thorns and Roses.
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3 weeks ago | 
brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro
Nigerian author Abi Daré has been awarded the first-ever Climate Fiction Prize for her second novel, And So I Roar. The £10,000 prize, which recognizes fiction that addresses the climate crisis in fresh and impactful ways, was presented at a ceremony in London. And So I Roar was published by Sceptre in 2024. It revisits the life of Adunni, the teenage protagonist from Daré’s breakout debut The Girl with the Louding Voice.
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3 weeks ago | 
brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro
The results are in for the 2024 South African Horrorfest Bloody Parchment Short Story Competition, a cornerstone of the country’s premier horror and speculative fiction event. This year’s winner is Xan van Rooyen for the story “Splinters of the Schism”, praised by judges for its originality and chilling craft. Xan van Rooyen is a South African-born, Finland-based writer of speculative fiction whose work spans aetherpunk, cyberpunk, and African futurisms.
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3 weeks ago | 
brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro
At Brittle Paper, we love covers and believe it is a unique aspect of a book’s story, so when Tina Knowles’s memoir Matriarch was published in April, the cover caught our attention. The cover art features a painted portrait of Knowles seated against a background of blooming white flowers and turquoise sky.
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3 weeks ago | 
brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro
On Friday, April 25th, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie held a book signing in Lagos for the Nigerian release of Dream Count. The event was hosted by the Nigerian bookstore chain Roving Heights at their Landmark venue and drew a large, mostly young group of attendees. The crowd of happy fans gathered at the pavilion to meet Adichie. The Dream Count sold out its initial release in Nigeria and became an instant bestseller.
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1 month ago | 
brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro
Griots are oral historians who transmit history and ideas through stories, poetry, and music. For centuries they have passed on stories of Kaabu, an influential precolonial kingdom in West Africa. The stories cover its rise and spectacular destruction of its capital, Kansala. Now, new archaeological work is uncovering the remains of that legendary city in present-day Guinea-Bissau. According to NPR, the excavation is being led by Sirio Canós-Donnay, an archaeologist at the University of Valencia.
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1 month ago | 
brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro
Pope Francis passed away on April 21, 2025 and the funeral held a week later. There has been mourning worldwide for a man who many believed to be a spiritual leader and who affected the lives many beyond the walls of the Church. For some African writers—Okey Ndibe, Chika Unigwe, Yvonne Owuor, and Enuma Okoro—they remember the Pope specifically as a reader, who loved poetry and believed that writers help us think about the human condition and draw nearer to truth.
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1 month ago | 
brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro
(V. Y. Mudimbe passed away on April 22, 2025.)I took a course with V. Y. Mudimbe while I was a doctoral student at Duke University sometime in the early 2010s. It was a course on Existentialism. We read Descartes and Husserl, but much of the semester was spent on a page-by-page study of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and his play No Exit. It was an intense course, once a week for about three hours, in a sun-drenched classroom on East Campus. Mudimbe taught in the Comparative Literature department.
