Geoff Ryman

The year 2019 saw the growth of interest in Afri­can fiction pay off in terms of publications of novels.

The biggest news of the year may be that Tade Thompson’s Rosewater won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. This year also saw the publication of the sec­ond and third books in the Wormwood series, The Rosewater Insurrection and The Rosewater Redemption. Thompson also published a new novella about Molly Southbourne, ...Read More

Calendar year 2018 was dominated by the over­whelming success of the movie Black Panther, which drew a whole new audience to cinemas in cit­ies like Nairobi and Lagos. It inspired a sugar-rush of love, a hastily retitled Nol­lywood rip off, and a small mini-backlash from those who rewrote Wakanda’s history to make it more credibly African. Elsewhere in film, the Nigerian short Hello Rain, adapted by CJ Obasi ...Read More

2017 was a year of small watersheds and consolida­tions, rather than break­throughs for African specu­lative fiction.

Roughly 40 short specu­lative fiction stories were published in magazines and anthologies, according to Wole Talabi’s database on the African Speculative Fiction Society website.

In some ways it was a year of sales to international markets. Wole Talabi, Cat Hellesin, and Dare Segun Falowo had important stories published in F&SF. Jordan Ifueko wrote “Os­hun ...Read More