The website is currently undergoing maintenance. We appreciate your understanding!
diversity trainer, translator and editor of poco.lit.
Jessica Mawuena Lawson’s debut novel Kekeli is set in that magical time between high school graduation exams and whatever comes next. During these few weeks, young adults often suddenly find themselves with a lot of time on their hands. The protagonist, who is named Kekeli – like the book itself –, uses this opportunity to […]
more...February 11 is Monja Blanca Day in Guatemala, a national holiday that honors the rare white orchid, which was designated the national flower in 1934. We take this day as an opportunity to reflect on national symbols and talk to Guatemalan botanist Fredy Archila, who is committed to protecting the flower.
more...Under the somewhat abstract title Weltenwechsel (Change of Worlds), Kraft tells the story of a Black girl growing up in southern Germany shortly after the end of the Second World War. With this perspective on the post-war period, Kraft fills a gap in the German literary landscape.
more...I was curious to read Abdulrazak Gurnah’s latest novel – his first publication since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. Theft follows Karim, Fauzia, and Badar, who grow up between Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, become friends, and fall in love.
more...Brotherless Night is an intimate and unforgettable story of a country and a family coming undone. It’s a novel about the early years of the civil war in Sri Lanka.
more...During the era of German colonialism, wireless telegraphy served as an instrument of colonial control. Various aspects of this history and its legacies are addressed in Lene Albrecht’s novel Weiße Flecken (White Spots), in the workbook From Windhoek to Kamina to Nauen, and in the exhibition “Signals of Power” at the Brandenburg Museum in Potsdam.
more...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?
more...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.
more...Jennifer Neal always led a very mobile life and in her memoir My Pisces Heart she shares what it was like to live on four different continents as a Black queer woman.
more...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.
more...
