Then and Now

Simone Haysom is a writer based in Cape Town. She is a recipient of a Miles Morland Writing Award.

Beatrice Lamwaka is a recipient of the 2011 Young Achievers Award. She was shortlisted for the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing and was a finalist for the South African PEN/Studzinski Literary Award 2009. The anthology of short stories Queer Africa: new and collected fiction, which includes her short story, won the 26th Lambda Literary Award in the fiction anthology category in 2014.

Neema Komba is a poet and writer from Tanzania. She is the 2014 winner of the Etisalat Prize for Literature in the flash fiction category. She is also the coordinator of the Woman Scream Festival in Tanzania, which is part of a worldwide movement to fight against gender-based violence using poetry.

Chike Frankie Edozien was raised in Lagos, Nigeria. He co-founded the AFRican magazine to tell African stories overlooked by international media. When he is not teaching journalism at New York University, he’s travelling across Africa.

Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, OBE, editor, critic, and broadcaster, is former deputy editor of Granta magazine, series editor for the Kwani? Manuscript Prize, and the deputy chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She served as a judge for the 2015 Man Booker Prize panel. She lives in London, England.