Oxord Literary Festival

Off to Oxford to The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival
and the official UK launch of One World, the anthology of short stories published tomorrow by New Internationalist.
With not a little trepidation I will be joining our great leader, Nigerian journalist Ovo Adagha, literary megastar Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and fellow contributors Elaine Chiew and Jude Dibia on a panel at 6 pm. We will all be reading excerpts from our work, and talking about the anthology.


here they all are. You know what I look like.

Chairing the panel will be Dr Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Writing in English in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford, and Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is the Founding and General Series Editor of the Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures, a series which offers accessible introductions to postcolonial writing.

From the Literary Festival Programme: New Internationalist has published a collection of twenty three short stories from fourteen countries, each of which speaks with the clarity and intensity of the human experience. The swift transition from story to story, from continent to continent, from child’s perspective to adult’s; together, these evoke the complex but balanced texture of the world we live in. The diversity of subject, style and perspective results in vivid and poignant stories that haunt the reader. The collection also reflects what can be done by writers thousands of miles apart in the borderless world of the internet, where many of them first met. Come and hear four of these writers discussing their stories and the anthology. The authors are donating their royalties to Médecins Sans Frontières.


I am also planning to hear Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at 2.pm, when she is being interviewed in celebration of her new short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, (Fourth Estate, 2 April).

This from the Literary Festival programme:
The twelve stories in this brilliant collection straddle the cultures of Nigeria and the West. Orange Prize winning author of Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie creates characters battling with the responsibilities of modern life, a world in which identity is too often compromised. The title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to re-examine them. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, this collection is a resounding confirmation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's prodigious storytelling powers.


Click HERE for an interview with the author, some years back, by another of the One World team, Molara Wood.