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Ellah Wakatama Allfrey

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Full Name
  
Ellah Wakatama

Role
  
Writer

Name
  
Ellah Allfrey

Known for
  
Editing

Nationality
  
British


Ellah Wakatama Allfrey wwwthestarcomcontentdamthestarentertainment

Born
  
16 September 1966 (age 57) (
1966-09-16
)
Harare, Zimbabwe

Occupation
  
Literary editor and publisher

NEWS - The great Chinua Achebe was the man who gave Africa a voice Ellah Wakatama Allfrey


Ellah Wakatama Allfrey (born 16 September 1966) is a Zimbabwe-born editor and literary critic. She is a former Deputy Editor of Granta (2009–13) and former Senior Editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House. She sits on the board of the Writers' Centre Norwich, has been Deputy Chair of the Council of the Caine Prize for African Writing since 2011 and is a patron of the Etisalat Prize for Literature. She was the 2013 Chair of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Contents

Allfrey's journalism has appeared in The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Observer and she is a regular contributor to the book pages of NPR. Her broadcasting includes a series of author interviews for Granta.com and she contributes regularly to NPR's All Things Considered and BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review.

In 2011 Allfrey was on the judging panel of both the David Cohen Prize and the Caine Prize. In 2012 she was chair of the fiction panel for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Her introduction to Woman of the Aeroplanes by Kojo Laing (Heinemann African Writers Series) was published in 2012. She edited the anthology Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara (2014), showcasing the writers in the Africa39 initiative. She was a judge of the Man Booker Prize for 2015.

Awards

A Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, Allfrey was awarded an OBE in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to the publishing industry.

In 2016 she received a Culture for Service Award from Goshen College, from where she graduated in 1988.

Selected articles

  • Review of Call It Dog by Marli Roode (The Guardian, 28 August 2013)
  • "The great Chinua Achebe was the man who gave Africa a voice" (The Observer, 24 March 2013)
  • "All Hail the African Renaissance" (The Telegraph, 9 September 2011)
  • "The cultural battle gave us books and music of genius" (The Observer, 13 April 2013)

    • Podcasts/video

  • Guardian Books podcast: Political fiction
  • Ellah Wakatama Allfrey on Behind the Headlines.
  • Ellah Allfrey talks with Audible about the fourth edition of Granta′s "Best of Young British Novelists".

    • Opinion

  • "The 10 best contemporary African books".
  • Quoted by Parselo Kantai, Nairobi, in "Publishing: Book ends and new beginnings",The Africa Report, 8 February 2012.
  • "No Violet: From the African Booker to the Booker longlist"(quote)

    • Interviews

  • "Ellah Wakatama Allfrey OBE on Behind the Headlines".
  • "Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Granta in Nairobi, Kenya".
  • Nyana Kakoma, "Ellah Wakatama Allfrey on how she became an editor and why editing should be professionalised", African Writers Trust, 30 June 2014.

    • Collaborations

  • African Writers Trust Literary Feast, Uganda, May 2012.
  • Literary week Nairobi, judge.
  • Judge for Kwani? Manuscript Project – literary prize for unpublished fiction by African writers.
  • "The Trans-Atlantic, the Diaspora, and Africa" participant. – conference hosted by Oxford University Research Centre for the Humanities, to discuss the newest theoretical scholarship emerging from the interdisciplinary fields of USA-derived Diaspora Studies and British-derived Trans-Atlantic Studies, and how these fields have diverged and converged in relation to the idea of Africa.
  • Patron of Etisalat Prize for Literature – pan-African prize celebrating first-time African writers of published books of fiction.
  • Judge for 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – award for the best piece of unpublished short fiction (2000–5000 words) in English.
  • Wasafiri magazine (contributor), Volume 22, Issue 3, 2007.
  • Interviewer – Binyavanga Wainaina's Book Launch
  • Peter Godwin, The Fear: The Last Days of Robert Mugabe (acknowledgements).
  • Judge for 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing.
  • Introduction to Kojo Laing, Woman of the Aeroplanes.
  • Judge 2011 for David Cohen Prize for Literature.
  • Editor of Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara (2014), with a Preface by Wole Soyinka
  • Judge 2015 for Man Booker Prize
  • Editor of Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction (Cassava Republic Press, 2016)

    • References

    Ellah Wakatama Allfrey Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA