Happy news: For the Pan African Literary Forum contest, I took first place in the Africana Fiction category. I am doubly honored as Junot Díaz, the Pulitzer Prize winning fiction writer and essayist, was the judge for that category.
Other news: Two unpublished novels. One complete; one still in progress. Notes on both below.
1. What Was Left Behind (Completed. Yet to be published.)
What Was Left Behind is a story searching for consciousness in the soul of a community. It begins with a tornado. Shocked survivors seek solace and meaning in the wake of total loss. Fundamentalist millenarians blending with myth, reality, spiritualism and religious fervour, seize the opportunity and polarise believers against non-believers predicting the End Time. While the non-believers watch in confusion, the believers accelerate the apocalypse by organising a last ritual feast that ends in the infamous Ugandan mass murder.
Pain and love, conflict and healing are woven together in a tight mesh that turns individual grief into a people’s collective memory.
2. My Ambrosia. (In progress)
The novel manuscript opens with the narrator telling the story of My Ambrosia, a restless and fragmented soul who set out on a journey seeking connection and centering. Eventually, Ambrosia finds stability after confronting and overcoming mental and physical borders. Released, she journeys on to build a Peoplist Nation as another step towards identity consolidation and wholeness.
My Ambrosia is a vision of a new Africa that’s healed, beyond battering. The major themes are conflict and love, identity and ownership, necessity and choice, bridging and cohesion.
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