Continental Drift: New writing from Africa
Sulaiman Addonia, Chika Unigwe and Brian Chikwava in conversation

26 June 2009
7:00 - 9:00 pm

At St John’s Church, Broadway, Stratford E15

Tickets £5 from Newham Bookshop, telephone 020 8552 9993

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Sulaiman S.M.Y. Addonia was born in Eritrea to an Eritrean mother and an Ethiopian father. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan following the Om Hajar massacre in 1976, and in his early teens he lived and studied in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He has lived in London since 1990. The Consequences of Love is his first novel, and presents an eye-opening, authentic and terrifying tale of illicit love in Saudi Arabia.

Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria. On Black Sister’s Street explores the lives of four Nigerian women working as prostitutes in the red-light district of Antwerp who spend their nights attracting customers from their windows on the Schiperskwartier and dreaming of escape. Raw, vivid and suffused the power of the oral storytelling tradition, On Black Sister’s Street is a moving story of the illusion of the West through African eyes, and its annihilation. It is also, however, a story of courage, of unity and of hope.

Brian Chikwava is among the exciting new generation of writers emerging on the African continent. Although born in Bulawayo, Chikwava’s formative years were spent in Harare. He is the 2004 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. In his astonishing, revelatory original debut, Harare North, Brian Chikwava tackles head-on the realities of life as a refugee in London..From the first line the language fizzes with energy, humour and not a little menace.