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Anna von Rath

diversity trainer, translator and editor of poco.lit.

Fiona Williams
The House of Broken Bricks

The House of Broken Bricks is a sad and beautiful story about the cracks in the lives of the Hembrys, a mixed-race family in rural Somerset. It’s a family of four in a difficult situation and it seems like it’s going to break them. But maybe there is still a chance that they can somehow find their way back to each other?

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Olufunke Grace Bankole
The Edge of Water

Why are there connections between the well-being of the people in New Orleans and Ibadan? How is the destructive hurricane in one place connected to the drying up river in the other? In Olufunke Grace Bankole’s sad and beautiful debut novel The Edge of Water, this is due to a disregarded prophecy.

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Nnedi Okorafor
Death of the author

Nnedi Okorafor’s newest novel, Death of the Author, is an africanfuturist story about a writer named Zelu, who suddenly becomes world-famous overnight after writing a book about robots and artificial intelligence.

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“People are read differently depending on where they are”: A conversation with Raphaëlle Red on the principle of the road novel

Raphaëlle Red is an author currently living in Berlin who writes in French, German and English. She is also doing her PhD on literature in the African diaspora. We had the pleasure of speaking with her about her French-language debut novel Adikou, its protagonist’s journey and its context from one language to the next. The German translation of the novel by Patricia Klobusiczky  was published in September 2024 by Rowohlt Verlag.

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Mithu Sanyal
Antichristie

I rarely voluntarily choose to read stories about time travel, even though when done well they not only create narrative potential, but also orchestrate and scrutinize connections between the past and present. And this is exactly what Sanyal accomplishes with Antichristie.

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Jessica J. Lee
Dispersals

Jessica J. Lee’s third book, Dispersals, On Plants, Borders and Belonging, consists of fourteen personal essays about plants crossing borders and putting down roots in new places. Lee chooses several trees, shrubs and algae, which hold meaning in her own life, to engage with their history and journeys into different parts of the world. In doing so, she questions under what circumstances species are considered either cosmopolitan or invasive.

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Mirrianne Mahn
Issa

Issa, who lives in Frankfurt am Main, is pregnant and desperate. The situation with her child’s father is complicated as is with her mother. No longer knowing what to do, and at the urging of her mother, she flies to see her grandmother and great-grandmother in Cameroon.

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