One World Launch

The beautiful quadrangle where the launch took place.

Ovo Adagha and moi

L to R: Dan Raymond-Barker of New Internationalist, Jude Dibia, moi, Constantinos Tzikas, Elaine Chiew, Chris Brazier of New Internationalist, Ovo Adagha.



This took place in the JCR at Christ Church College, and although it had some fairly heftly competition (there are four or five events on in the same time slots), we were informed that it was a sellout! All tickets sold out. The room was packed, and there was standing room only. It was lovely.

Ovo Adagha was introduced by our lovely chairperson, and he intoduced the anthology, talking about his vision and how it came about. How it started as a Third World collection of stories and how we all threw out that concept very fast.

Elaine read first, then Jude, then it was my turn. I read the opening of the story, asking the audience to suspend disbelief to aee/hear me as a six-year-old Inuit girl! There was discussion about the project, how it was conceived, how writers were chosen. How we organised it, worked together and so on.

There was much mention of Zoetrope. The online forum where the anthology was born and where it grew up.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie read, then Ovo. There was much signing, and natter, and all the anthologies brought to the event went. Fantastico. I also signed a few of my own collection - Blackwells Bookshop had really done well.

We were then treated to dinner by New Internationalist at a nearby superb Chinese restaurant, in the company of James, the Fund Director of Medecins Sans Frontieres.

The anthology is much in evidence in the Blackwells marquee bookshop in the meadows!! One pile on a stand, and another on the signed books table.

It is REAL!

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.

ONE WORLD!!!!!

Not even launched yet, and a school in New Jersey is ordering 600 copies of our anthology for their students to read next term, and asking for authors to come and speak to the students in the autumn.

One school. ONE.

The issues in this anthology are fundamental to our world. Our ONE WORLD.

I am delighted that New Internationalist are publishing us. I support their ethos, and it is a privilege to join their publications.
I think we've got a winner. A real winner.

All royalties are going to Medecins Sans Frontieres. (Doctors Without Borders if you are in the US.)

Oh WOW! ONE WORLD IS HERE! SEE THIS VIDEO!

The amazing Sequoia Nagamatsu has created this video. It is so good, SO good... turn sound on and listen. Even if you don't want to get the book... look!
(Oh and my copies arrived this morning. I am a tad excited...)

ONE WORLD - A GLOBAL ANTHOLOGY OF SHORT STORIES

The One World Anthology is being launched in the UK on 1st April (honestly!) at the Oxford Literary Festival.
I have a story therein, and am one lucky person.