Karina M Szczurek Editor & Author

Jason Mykl Snyman currently serves on the board of Short Story Day Africa and as the Fiction Editor for Expound magazine. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including New Contrast, Jalada Africa, Bloody Parchment, Kalahari Review, Helios Quarterly, The Examined Life Review, Expound and more. Born in Jelenia Góra, Poland, Karina M. Szczurek lived in Austria, the United States and Wales, before finding a home in South Africa. She is the author of Truer than Fiction: Nadine Gordimer Writing Post-Apartheid South Africa (2008), Invisible Others (2014) and The Fifth Mrs Brink (2017), and she is the editor of Touch: Stories of Contact (2009), Encounters with André Brink (2010), Contrary: Critical Responses to the Novels of André Brink(with Willie Burger, 2013), Water: New Short Fiction from Africa (with Nick Mulgrew, 2015), Misplaced and Other Stories: New Short Fiction from African Kids (2017, with Catherine Shepherd), and most recently, You Make Me Possible: The Love Letters of Karina M. Szczurek and André Brink (2018). Her play for young adults, A Change of Mind, won the MML Literature Award in the Category English Drama in 2012. She also writes short stories, essays, and poetry. In 2018, she received the Thomas Pringle Award for her book reviewing. She is a proud board member of PEN SA and SSDA. Rachel Zadok was born in Tel Aviv and raised in Johannesburg. She has a National Diploma in Fine Arts. In 2001, she escaped a career in advertising to become a writer, which she describes as being a little like running away to join the circus without the safety net. She is the author of two novels: Gem Squash Tokoloshe (2005), shortlisted for The Whitbread First Novel Award and The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and longlisted for the IMPAC Award; and Sister-Sister (2013), shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Prize and The Herman Charles Bosman Prize, and longlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Award. She lives in Cape Town with her husband and daughter. MacSmart Ojiludu is a writer and freelance content creator living in Nigeria. He has a Bachelors in Technology from the Federal University of Technology Owerri. His fiction deals with themes of surrealism and oddity. Kanyinsola Olorunnisola is a poet, essayist and writer of fiction. His work interrogates anxiety, broken lineage, [in]sanity, grief and the black body as a warfront. His debut collection, In My Country, We’re All Crossdressers was published as a chapbook by Praxis. He is the founder of the SPRINNG Literary Movement. Najwa Binshatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist. She is the author of three novels: The Slave Yards (2016), Orange Content (2008), and The Horses' Hair (2005) in addition to collections of short stories and plays. In this collection, Sawad Hussain translated Najwa Binshatwan's chapter into English. Hussain is an award-winning Arabic-English literary translator. She co-teaches a workshop on translating Arabic comics at UK secondary schools via the collective Shadow Heroes. Her most recent translation is the Palestinian resistance novella Passage to the Plaza by Sahar Khalifeh (shortlisted for the 2020 Palestine Book Awards). She holds an MA in Arabic literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies, and is passionate about bringing narratives written in Arabic from the African continent to wider audiences. Nadia Ahidjo is a Pan-African feminist writer and development professional based in Dakar, Senegal. She uses her experience in the development sector to weave together fiction and non-fiction stories. Her other work has been published by Afreada and African Feminisms, and is available online. Innocent Chizaram Ilo is Igbo. Their works interrogate gender, class, politics and sexuality. They were awarded the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa Region. A finalist for the Gerald Kraak Award and Short Story Day Africa Prize, their work has been published in Fireside Magazine, Overland, adda, Strange Horizons, Granta and has won the Africa YMCA and Oxford Festival of the Arts short story contests. Melusi Nkomo was born and bred in Zimbabwe. He lives and studies in Switzerland. He has been published in Wasafiri Magazine and New Frame and shortlisted for the 2018 Wasafiri Prize for New Writing. He holds a doctoral degree in Anthropology and Sociology from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Victor Forna has a degree in Civil Engineering from Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, with a special interest in Environmental Engineering. Nicholas A. Dawn is a South African/American novelist, essayist, poet and blogger, writing at the collision course of literary speculative fiction, Capitalocene ecosophies and radical politics. He tutors humanities and languages to high schoolers. His work has been published in New Contrast. Genna Gardini is a South African writer, theatre-maker, and educator. She is a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and recently won the 2020 CASA award to finish her latest play, Many Scars. Genna’s poetry collection, Matric Rage, received a commendation for the Ingrid Jonker Prize and she was a 2016 National Fellow at the Institute for Creative Arts. Philisiwe Twijnstra is a writer, director and actor. She lives in Durban where she founded Durban Women Playwrights in 2017. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Short Sharp Stories prize. Her plays have been performed at or won awards from the National Arts Festival, the Women’s Theatre Festival in Johannesburg, Zee Zee Theatre in Canada, among others. She was recipient for the 2018 CASA playwright award residency and a 2020 Distell Playwright Finalist. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from Rhodes University. Doreen Anyango is a Ugandan fiction writer, scriptwriter and biotechnologist. Her short fiction has appeared in several online journals and in print anthologies with FEMRITE (The Uganda Women Writers’ Association) and Writivism. She was longlisted for the 2016 Writivism Short Story Prize. She is an alumnus of the inaugural Mawazo Novel Writing Workshop and is hard at work on her first novel. Masiyaleti Mbewe is a queer Zambian afrofuturist writer, photographer, activist, academic, TEDx alumnus and Masters in Arts student based in Windhoek, Namibia. Her work revolves around the use of various mediums to navigate and negotiate alternative African futures using the confluence of language and cultural exchange in the representation of Africans in popular culture. Her fiction writing also aims to examine African technologies and the digitization of African futures. Julia Smuts Louw is a South African screenwriter, primarily working in animation. She has won a Muse Award for animation screenwriting, and her work has appeared on Nickelodeon Digital, Disney XD, Cartoon Network Africa and other channels. Her poetry and essays have appeared in New Contrast, Stanzas, Literary Mama, Animal Literary Journal and elsewhere. Her short story Paper House was published in the anthology Touch: Stories of Contact (2009). She lives in Cape Town with her husband and two children. Liam Brickhill is a freelance journalist from Zimbabwe. He is a multidisciplinary creative. He has worked in Southern Africa, England and India as a freelance cricket journalist, writes short fiction, and has produced and edited several music videos and an award-winning short film. Liam is a 2020 Africa Is a Country fellow and is working on his debut novel. Jacob M'hango is a writer of literary fiction with themes that seek to explore the human condition. He is the author of a story collection, Curse of the Fig, published by Gadsden Publishers in 2018. A rave review of the book appeared in the Zambia Daily Mail. The book became one of the required texts for students pursuing an MA in Literature at the University of Zambia. It was also approved by the Curriculum Development Centre as a supplementary literature text for secondary schools in Zambia. Jacob lives with his family in Lusaka. He received an MA in History from the University of Zambia in 2020. When he is not writing or reading or being inspired by silence, he likes to watch a good drama, thriller or mystery. He is currently working on a novel. Kevin Mogotsi studied BA (Hons) Broadcasting and Journalism as an undergraduate at Limkokwing University in Gaborone, where his interest for writing was nurtured. Shortly thereafter, he started writing short films, plays and short stories. Mbozi Haimbe was born and raised in Lusaka, Zambia and lives in the Norfolk, UK with her family. A qualified Social Worker by profession, Mbozi’s short story ‘Madam’s Sister’ won the Africa region prize of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2019, and a 2020 PEN America/Robert J. Dau Prize. Mbozi has a Master of Studies in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge. She was awarded a Develop Your Creative Practice award by Arts Council England in January 2020. She is currently working on her debut novel, an Afrofuturistic story loosely based on the Makishi masquerade traditions of the North-western people of Zambia. Mbozi was shortlisted for a Nommo Prize for her story "Shelter", featured in this collection. Idza Luhumyo is a Kenyan writer with training in screenwriting and a background in law. Her artistic practice lies at the intersection of law, film, and literature. She is currently studying towards an MA in Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London. She is the first ever recipient of the inaugural Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award. Idza won the 2022 Caine Prize for her short story "Five Years Next Sunday", featured in this collection. An alumnus of Chimamanda Adichie's Farafina workshop, Alithnayn Abdulkareem’s work has been featured in Quartz, Ozy, ZAM, Wasafiri, Popula, Africa Is A Country, and Catapult among others. She was longlisted for the 2018 Short Story Day Africa prize and in 2020 she was part of the critics Academy at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Yefon Isabelle is a Cameroonian writer, jurist, feminist and determinist. She has authored a number of books and numerous works of poetry. She resides in the North West Region of Cameroon. Edwin Okolo seeks to explore through his fiction lived experiences that are alien to him because of his gender and race. He has written for several blogs and literary magazines including Kalahari Review, The Lonely Crowd, speculative fiction at Omenana, Sable Lit Mag and a wildly popular webseries at TheNakedConvos.com. He is currently an editor at Stories.ng and finishing his first novel.