Michela Wrong has stepped down as the literary director of the Miles Morland Foundation, a position she has held since 2014.
Michela Wrong is a British journalist and author who spent years covering events across Africa for Reuters, the BBC, and the Financial Times. She started her literary journey when wrote her first nonfiction book In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz in 2001. In that book, she covered the time she has spent in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) as it transitioned from the leadership of Mobutu Sese Seko to that of Laurent-Désiré Kabila.
She would follow through with two other nonfiction books starting with I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation, the story of Eritrea and its existence through Italian, British, American and Ethiopian occupation in 2004. In 2009, her third and arguably most famous offering Its Our Time To Eat focusing on Kenyan journalist and civil society activist John Githongo who uncovered widespread evidence of corruption then in President Mwai Kibaki’s government. In 2015, she would start her journey in fiction with her debut novel Borderlines a compelling courtroom drama and a gritty, aromatic evocation of place, inspired by recent events.
She took up the role as Miles Morland Foundation literary director in 2014 and assisted the organisation through the African literary scene. The organisation has since been at the centre of many of the literary initiatives that you read about on this blog across the continent. She takes a break for the most literary of reasons, she needs to finish a book. Here is the whole statement from the foundation.
Miles Morland Foundation and Michela Wrong
Michela Wrong joined the Miles Morland Foundation as Literary Director in 2014. At that time the Foundation had only recently been set up and we were beginning to focus on encouraging and enabling African writing.
Four years on, our 2017 Writing Scholarships received 550 entries, we have played an important part in helping African literary festivals to grow and prosper, started our own African Writing Workshops, and formed a relationship with the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing School, the finest in Europe, to help African writers.
Michela has played a huge part in this. Without her energy, enthusiasm, contacts and knowledge we would never have got where we are. Sadly for us, Michela, who has already authored four books on Africa, has another one in the making. After our Bulago Island Workshop in February, Michela will step down as our Literary Director to concentrate on her own writing. She will be hugely missed but we are pleased that she has agreed to remain an MMF consultant allowing us to call on her for advice from time to time. She will always be part of the MMF family.
I personally will miss Michela hugely but she has a book to write and I shall be the first in the queue to buy it.
Miles Morland
January 2018
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