CATALYST PRESS
CAPTIVE: New Short Fiction from Africa
ISBN 9781946395573 | trade paper | $16.95 | publication date Apr 2024
Introducing Captive, the newest collaboration between Catalyst Press and Short Story Day Africa, the publishing team behind Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa, which features the Caine Prize winning story, “Five Years Next Sunday” by Idza Luhumyo. In Captive, twelve new and emerging writers from Africa and the African Diaspora explore the identities that connect us, the obsessions that bewitch us, and the self-delusions that tear us apart.
Passion and apathy, creation and destruction, honesty and deception–the blurred lines between these powerful forces are fundamental to the human condition. In three parts, the writers of Captive investigate these liminal spaces and rail against the boxes in which others seek to confine them, as writers, as Africans, and as humans.
Journey from the fantastical Heaven’s Mouth where time stands still, to a London bus where a neurodiverse woman steals love to the songs of Tom Jones . . . flip the page to Ghana to examine a fertility fetish, or a post-apocalyptic Lesotho where sentient AI uses our emotions against us . . . visit the deceptively beautiful islands off the Tanzanian coast, where the ocean is always hungry, and women pay the price. Captive is a riot of imagination, a collision of worlds, and a testament to the shape-shifting nature of the soul.
REVIEWS
Brittle Paper's "Anticipated African Books of 2024"
"Captive is an unusual medley of phenomenal stories that are not all speculative but showcase darn good storytelling layered with texture, specificity, and the authenticity of a personal touch. This anthology offers Afrocentric fiction, stories beautifully canvassed and etched out with the finest strokes that sometimes coat stories within stories." - Locus Magazine
"Literary fiction at its best, with over 400 pages stuffed with important themes, entertaining motifs, and heart-wrenching events. [...] Zadok and Moffett have gathered some seriously skilled, insightful authors. Those authors have poured unflinching and intense visions into these pages. The journeys awaiting you are profound." — Lightspeed Magazine
"Relationships—nurtured and betrayed, challenged and discarded—dominate the bulk of the narratives, presented in various genres, including contemporary, dystopic, speculative, even the story-in-verse." — Booklist
"With Captive: New Short Fiction from Africa, Short Story Day Africa once again showcases what is at the heart of African writing — bold creativity and diversity, proudly unapologetic, and deserving of being read across the globe.”— Karen Jennings, Booker Prize longlisted author of An Island
"With Captive, Short Story Day Africa upends our expectations of how a short-fiction anthology should be put together. In here, all good things come in three. We linger—even luxuriate—in the writers' imaginations for longer than a single story, witnessing in real time the thrilling shapeshifting of craft, vision, and preoccupation. Televised suicide pacts unfold in unliveable presents. Lovers leave because they want to stay. Girls with three faces defy the limits of space and time. In coastal towns, mountaintop villages, and frazzled memories: stories within stories within stories unfurl in wondrous heres and hereafters. The stories in this anthology, like all good stories, defy cursory summary. And like all good stories: they require digging into. What a wonderful addition to the literary landscape, what a delectable survey of the breadth, and indeed depth, of the African literary imaginary." —Idza Luhumyo, 2022 Caine Prize Winner
Sola Njoku is a freelance writer and editor, children’s author and mum of two living in Berkshire, England. Sola is currently researching Yoruba culture and Anglophone African Literature and is due to begin a doctorate programme in African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. She has been engaged in literary and arts journalism for over a decade, and has worked with BBC Africa, The Caine Prize and Granta. Her writing has been featured in Wasafiri, Next Newspapers, The Guardian, The Punch and many other Nigerian publications. She has recently published Moyo ati Kayin Books, a series of bilingual children’s books in three Nigerian Languages in a bid to promote early multilingualism and create an avenue for children to develop simultaneously a love of languages and literature. She continues to work on more adult and children’s writing. Follow her @yorubamama and @readerinafricanliterature
Moso Sematlane is a writer and filmmaker living in Maseru, Lesotho. His works have been published in Nat. Brut, The Kalahari Review, and adda, the online literary magazine of the Commonwealth Foundation. His story “Tetra Hydro Cannabinol” was shortlisted for the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and his film “The Season Hyssops” won best unproduced script at the Writer’s Guild of South Africa Muse. He is an assistant editor at Lolwe. Follow Moso @mososematlane.
Aba Amissah Asibon is a Ghanaian writer and an SSDA Inkubator Fellow 2022. Her short fiction has been published in Guernica, Adda, The Johannesburg Review of Books and the Migrations: New Short Fiction from Africa anthology. She has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Miles Morland African Writing Scholarship. She is also a 2023 Wilbur Smith New Voices winner for her novel-in-progress.
Kabubu Mutua is an SSDA Inkubator Fellow 2022. He grew up in Machakos, Kenya. He was longlisted for the 2021 Afritondo Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the 2022 Peters Fraser and Dunlop Queer Fiction Prize. His work appears in The Hope, The Prayer, The Anthem anthology by Afritondo, A Long House, and the Commonwealth Writers adda magazine. Follow him @kabubumutua
Doreen Anyango is a Ugandan fiction writer, scriptwriter and biotechnologist, who was born and raised in Kampala. Her short fiction has appeared online in several journals. She has published short stories in print anthologies with FEMRITE, Writivism, Short Story Day Africa and Riptide. She was long-listed for the Writivism prize for fiction in 2016 and the SSDA prize in 2020. Her novel manuscript titled ‘A Darkness with Her Name On It’ was shortlisted for the Island Prize for debut African novelists.
Salma Abdulatif Yusuf is a Kenyan-born award-winning civic leader and writer with a BA in Marine Management and an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) with distinction at the University of East Anglia as the 2021 recipient of the Global Voices Scholarship Award. She has been longlisted for the Griots Well Programme for BAME Writers and shortlisted for the Alpine Poetry Fellowship. Her collection “Grains of Paradise” was shortlisted by Broken Sleep Books in the UK. Her work has been published in Lolwe, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Arts against Extremism, Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, Doek, Honey Badgers, Isele Magazine and elsewhere. She has performed her poetry at Toast Poetry UK in the Norwich Arts Center sharing the stage with Inua Ellams and Buddy Wakefields and at the Sainsbury Center where her work among others was broadcast live at BBC Look East. She participated in poetry/writing workshopping at the University of Nebraska facilitated by Kwame Dawes as a Mandela Washington Fellow. Her storytelling and leadership skills landed her the opportunity to serve as a Youth Media Zone Expert for the World Export Development Forum at the African Union. She received the Coast Women Magazine’s Woman Award of the Year and was selected as one of the 100 most influential Muslims in Kenya in 2019.
CONTRIBUTORS
Zanta Nkumane is a writer, journalist and ex-scientist from Eswatini. His work has appeared on Okay Africa, ThisIsAfrica, Mail & Guardian, Racebaitr, Kalahari Review, City Press, Arts 24,
New Frame, Amaka Studio, Doek, Lolwe, Olongo Africa, The Republic & The New York Times. He contributed essays to queer anthologies We’re F**king Here (2021) and Touch: Sex, Sexuality and Sensuality (2021). Zanta is the non-fiction editor at Doek! Follow Zanta @Zanta_Nk
Emily Pensulo is a Zambian writer masquerading as a banker during her weekdays. She holds an undergraduate degree in Business Administration and a master’s degree in Economic Policy Management. She’s written a biography of a local conservationist which is yet to be published and her writing has appeared in local magazines such as the Bulletin and Record and the Zacci Journal. She has also been published by the Kenyan magazine, Down River Road. In 2018, Emily was longlisted for the Kalemba Prize for her short story, ‘Dowry.’ And in 2020, she worked as a scriptwriter for a film project called, ‘Lifeblood,’ directed by a BAFTA nominated Director.
N. A. Dawn writes essays, poetry and literary speculative fiction, chiefly concerned with ecological politics and the prickly problem of human flourishing. He holds a BA in English Literature and Environmental Science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and has been featured in New Contrast Literary Magazine and Short Story Day Africa. He is known for philosophical digressions, drumming on everything, producing improbably vivid sound effects with his mouth, and for someone who spends so much time at a desk, his roundhouse kicks are actually quite nimble. Follow Nick @nadawnauthor
Khumbo Mhone is an actor turned marketer and entrepreneur living and working in Malawi. She received her undergraduate degree in Theatre and English from the University of Denver in Colorado before moving to New York where she worked as a professional actor for a year. Khumbo moved back to Malawi in 2015 and is currently the Business Development and Marketing Manager at Unicaf University. A contributor to Enthuse Magazine (an online publication based in Zimbabwe), she spends her free time writing her fiction blog, helping the community through Rotaract International, and working on her new novel about rain priestesses in pre-colonial Malawi. Follow her @kcmhone
Josephine Sokan is a Nigerian-born writer who moved to the UK as a child. She fell in love with literature in those tender years and now writes poetry, short stories, audio and stage scripts and articles on faith and motherhood. She is currently working on her first novel. Josephine relishes filling blank pages with stories that ask important questions. She enjoys exploring the delicate and difficult. Her work often deals with themes such as female identity, motherhood, the perceptions and attitudes towards mental health, “otherness” and faith from an Afro-European and very personal lens. She is a wife to her best friend and a mum to two cheeky little boys. She is a lover of romance but despises love stories. She is also a Nollywood connoisseur and enjoys experimental cuisine (eat at your own peril). Follow her @jo.sokan
Yovanka Paquete Perdigão is a Bissau-Guinean writer. Born in Lisbon, Yovanka grew up in Guinea-Bissau until the age of six when a civil war forced her to relocate to Lisbon. She has since lived in Abidjan, Dakar, the UK and Ireland.Yovanka’s writing has been deeply inspired by her early experiences of conflict. When she returned to Guinea-Bissau after more than twenty years, she became interested in researching Portuguese colonial legacies in Lusophone Africa, discovering the impact across oceans and in her own family. Yovanka has since worked to champion Lusophone African stories as an editor, and translator at Dedalus Books, and formerly as a podcaster on the Not Another Book Podcast. Yovanka’s writing has been featured in several platforms such as the Johannesburg Review of Books and AFREADA, and shortlisted for Penguin 2016 WriteNow, The Spread the Word’s City of Stories competition and the Miles Morland 2018/19 scholarship. In 2021, she was selected as one of the 100 most influential people from the Portuguese-speaking world. Follow her @postcolonialchild
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