Meet Praise Okeoghene Vandeh, Brittle Paper’s first ever Books Editor! Praise will be curating everything books at BP 📚✨
Praise Okeoghene Vandeh is a culture journalist and screenwriter with a BA in History and International Studies. She is interested in exploring the full spectrum of Black and African womanhood, writing women who are good, flawed, messy, contradictory, and fully human. She is drawn to stories that interrogate the human condition and the complexities of connection, with a particular interest in narratives that reveal moments of tenderness and the good lurking within
Her work has appeared in Culture Custodian, Document Women, Marie Claire Nigeria, Nollywire, NATAAL The Floor Mag UK, What Kept Me Up, and Moda Culture amongst others. A devoted lover of romance and romcoms, she fondly describes herself as a Nora Ephron alumnus.
Please join us in welcoming her to the editorial team!
#bookseditor #bookstagram #booklists #bookish #africanliterature
Brittle Paper is making a horror anthology!
African horror stories have always gripped our attention, commonly in the form of oral narratives, but later in novel form, like Amos Tutuola’s MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS and several works by the queen of African horror, Nuzo Onoh. Over the past decade, there has been a surge in the African horror literary genre, and we want our writers to be a part of it.
The anthology will include 15 pieces from writers from the continent and diaspora, and we are looking for work that will make our readers’ skin crawl. So, if you have short stories or a haunting poem that will illicit eerie, creepy, ghostly vibes, submit to the anthology! Or if you want to illustrate a gothic scene, we would love to see it!
Submission Guidelines:
All submissions need to consist of unpublished work
Poetry submission word limit: 500 words
Fiction, NonFic, and Essay submission word limit: 3500 words
Include an author bio along with nationality
Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but each submission needs to consist of only one piece of original and unpublished work.
Submissions need to be in Word format
AI use to construct work is not allowed.
Selection process will take place after the deadline, and late submissions may not be included in the selection process.
Email subject heading: Horror Anthology Submission
Email your submission to [email protected]
*Kindly note, if your work is accepted, you will need to be available for editorial and publication approval.
Deadline: 31 May 2026
#horror #anthology #horrorstories #africanwriters #getout
This month’s ✨Brittle Paper Brief ✨
Nigerian writer Ucheoma Onwutuebe @uche__oma has won the 2026 O. Henry Prize for her epistolary story “Where Are You and Where Is My Money,” selected by Tommy Orange. Nigerian poet Iheoma J. Uzomba @oma_is_loud has won the 2026 Evaristo Prize for African Poetry for “Father’s Love,” her largest win to date. Kenyan poet Awuor Ouma @simply_awuor has won the 2026 Cave Canem Prize for BLUE HANDS, BROWN SKIN, a debut collection moving through grief, migration, and language, out from UGA Press this Fall. And Tomi Adeyemi @tomiadeyemi made a cameo in The Devil Wears Prada 2 👠 We have not recovered..
🔗 Read the full articles at our links in bio!
#africanwomenwriters #africanwriters #africanliterature #tomiadeyemi #devilwearsprada2
Brittle Paper has a new series of original writing launching this month! We will publish a new installment of “Mercy in Manchester: Diasporic Diaries” every Saturday and the first entry is already available on our website. The series is sharp, funny, deeply honest, and full of the kind of detail that only someone living it could write.
Submissions Editor Tahzeeb Akram sat down with Mercy ahead of the launch and asked her when she first became interested in writing. She started almost without thinking about it, scribbling poems in school, obsessed with how words could stretch and twist into something out of this world. When she was 27, her parents handed her a collection of old scribblings they had quietly kept all those years. Reading them felt like meeting a younger version of herself she had forgotten. That was the moment she picked it back up.
🔗 Read the full interview and first installment at our links in bio!
#AfricanLiterature #AfricanWriters #AfricanDiaspora #LifeAbroad #TravelDiaries
On April 9, Nigerian-American author, playwright, and screenwriter Sefi Atta @sefi.atta asked her 7,000 followers on Facebook, “I would never use AI to write or revise. Surely it is cheating?” What followed in the comments was a lively debate on what makes writing human, ethical, and good. These are the discussions we live for at Brittle Paper, especially those concerned with the relationship between storytelling and technology. So we ask you to join this philosophical inquiry into our current technological landscape: Is AI cheating? Is it merely a calculator of language? Would you trust AI as an editor? What is authorship?
Let’s discuss!
#sefiatta #tonimorrison #writing #editing #ai
On April 7th, 750 students from small towns and mid-sized cities in the American Midwest gathered at UW–Madison to present hundreds of artworks commemorating a year reading Nnedi Okorafor’s DEATH OF THE AUTHOR for the annual Great World Texts Student Conference, a common read initiative run by UW–Madison’s Center for the Humanities.
The students created board games, sculptures, wax print textiles, a miniature Ijele, and even a makeup look merging Zelu’s face with Ankara the robot’s. Professor Edoro wrote an essay reflecting on this monumental event. “Every cliché about the power of literature to connect worlds stopped being a cliché…Asking the students to create something in conversation with the novel, to essentially translate the novel into another form, changes how they engage with it. They cannot rely on surface-level understanding because the task demands decisions. They have to decide what matters in the text, what can be carried over, what must be reimagined. It pulls them closer to the structure of the novel, to its imagery, and the logics and tensions of its many worlds.“
🔗 Read the full essay at our link in bio!
Featured: @nnediokorafor@madhumanities@ainehiedoro@wibookfest@svheartphotography
#africanfuturism #speculativefiction #africanliterature #africanwriters #nnediokorafor
Marcia Hutchinson’s THE MERCY STEP is shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction! For the first time in the prize’s thirty-year history, an African-owned, Black and woman-led small press is on the shortlist. As Cassava Republic phrased it on Twitter last week, “Marcia Hutchinson wrote from life. We published with conviction. That’s the whole story.”
THE MERCY STEP is a debut novel set in 1960s Bradford, following Mercy, the youngest child of a Windrush generation Jamaican family, navigating a chaotic household with a fierce inner life and the quiet determination to build a different future. Marcia Hutchinson is a British-Jamaican lawyer, activist, and former Labour Councillor who became a full-time writer at 60. The manuscript was passed over more than 50 times before it landed at Cassava Republic, where “something shifted in the room…We couldn’t imagine it not existing in the world.”
Cassava Republic was founded in Abuja in 2006 and now publishes across Africa and the UK. It is the kind of press that backs books it believes in, even when the path has been long. The winner of the 2026 Women’s Prize will be announced June 11 in London. Congratulations to Marcia Hutchinson and the entire Cassava Republic team ✍🏾🤎📚
@marxia1@cassavarepublicpress@womensprize
#WomensLit #BlackAuthors #AfricanPublishing #IndiePress #WomensPrize
On April 6, 2026, the Artemis II crew watched Earth set behind the Moon from 252,756 miles away. Commander Reid Wiseman took this unbelievable photo with his iPhone and called it “watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos.” We have been thinking about that image ever since, and about the African writers who have been imagining from foreign seats in the cosmos long before there were iPhones in space.
Looking for an otherworldly adventure? Here are eight space travel stories from the African literary imagination: Tade Thompson’s FAR FROM THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN turns a generation ship into a crime scene. Temi Oh’s DO YOU DREAM OF TERRA-TWO? asks what it costs to leave Earth behind forever. Kemi Ashing-Giwa’s THE SPLINTER IN THE SKY drops a tea expert into the heart of an interstellar empire. Eugen Bacon’s CLAIMING T-MO spans generations and galaxies. Shingai Njeri Kagunda’s WE WHO WILL NOT DIE asks what it means to carry a body through futures that were never built for you. Wole Talabi’s INCOMPLETE SOLUTIONS ranges across planets and timelines. Nnedi Okorafor’s BINTI sends a young Himba girl across the galaxy. And Tochi Onyebuchi’s WAR GIRLS follows two sisters fighting across a futuristic Nigerian civil war.
Drop more book recommendations and reactions in the comments 👽
@theonly_temioh@eugenbacon@shingai_be_like@wtalabi@nnediokorafor@treize64
#Africanfuturism #AfricanSFF #SpeculativeFiction #AfricanLiterature #SpaceTravel
Thousands of Wisconsin high school students read Nnedi Okorafor’s DEATH OF THE AUTHOR as part of the 2026 Great World Texts program and we got to close it out with this amazing talk at the Wisconsin Book Festival! Enjoy this tiny piece of the illuminating conversation between Professor Ainehi Edoro and Nnedi Okorafor as they reflect on why alien contact in LAGOON happens first with animals, what her Lagos-set first contact novel shares with DEATH OF THE AUTHOR, and what we can gain by imagining futures that de-center humanity.
We’ve been following Nnedi’s obsession with small creatures, insects, animals, the overlooked lives at the margins of the world for years, and this conversation finally gives us a window into how she crafts her stories and brings readers into her perspective 🦋🪲🪰🌊🐠
For those new to her works, Nnedi Okorafor builds worlds where African culture, mythology, and history meet technological possibility. She coined the term Africanfuturism: fiction rooted first and foremost in Africa, skewing optimistic, leaving the earth, and centered on people of African descent. Other notable works include WHO FEARS DEATH and the BINTI TRILOGY ✨
Featured: @nnediokorafor@ainehiedoro@wibookfest@madhumanities
#NnediOkorafor #Africanfuturism #Lagoon #DeathOfTheAuthor #SPECULATIVEFICTION
Congratulations to Tade Thompson and Eugen Bacon, winners at the 2026 British Science Fiction Association Awards! Thompson took home Best Shorter Fiction for THE APOLOGISTS, while Bacon won Best Non-Fiction (Short) for her essay SPEC FIC AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY: FINDING THE SELF. Earlier this year, we reported that African writers had secured 30 nominations across seven categories, the most significant showing the continent has had at the BSFA in recent memory. We’ve been cheering for this run! 🏆
@eugenbacon
#AfricanSFF #BSFAAwards #TadeThompson #EugenBacon #SpeculativeFiction
In a segment on the rise of Nigerian publishing, CNN International interviewed Othuke Ominiabohs of Masobe Books, writer and publisher Kadija George Sesay, and Ainehi Edoro of Brittle Paper.
Masobe Books was founded in 2018 and has contributed to a renaissance of African literature and readership with founder Othuke Ominiabohs noting that the romance genre accounts for over 50% of sales. Ominiabohs credits RovingHeights Bookstore for the growth in circulation of Nigerian titles.
Writer and publisher Kadija George Sesay celebrates the online literary space for giving diverse platforms to emerging African writers. Ainehi Edoro, founder of Brittle Paper, adds that “Nigerians are the most published Africans in the US and the UK, and what that means is that it trickles back home. Their influence actually affects the success of Nigerian publishing in Nigeria and this has been really good for the Nigerian literary space.”
Featured: @masobebooksng@rovingheights
#cnninternational #africanbooks #nigerianbooks #romancebookstagram #indiepublishing
Bright Aboagye’s “To All the Poems I Never Understood” is a reflection on what it means to write poetry without fully understanding it. Aboagye traces his journey from shallow early work through 24 rejections and late discoveries about poetic form. He reads poets like Romeo Oriogun and Marvellous Igwe with admiration but incomplete comprehension. He offers himself up as a writer speaking plainly about doubt, discipline, and the courage it takes to keep working.
🔗 Read the full essay under “Submissions: Original Writings” at our link in bio!
Bright Aboagye can be found on X @Bright_Abo9gye@nk_asante@romeo_oriogun@somacci
#WritersOnWriting #LiteraryEssay #Craft #PoetryJourney #EmergingWriters
