Molara Wood ended proceedings on Sunday at Afrolit Sans Frontières Season 3 from Lagos, Nigeria on May 31, 2020. She was hosted by Renee Edwige Dro.
Afrolit Sans Frontières, a virtual literary festival for writers of African origin, started as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic international lockdown. It has had two iterations with Season 1 curated by founder Zukiswa Wanner in March and Season 2 the founder co-curated with Maaza Mengiste in April. Season 3, with curation by Mohale Mashigo and Zukiswa Wanner, features 16 writers from 13 countries streaming from 15 cities in English, French, and Portuguese. All sessions run twice daily on the official Afrolit Sans Frontières Instagram page from May 25 to June 1.
The festival which started on Africa Day, May 25, has so far featured Dilman Dila in Kampala, Uganda; Tochi Onyebuchi in New York, USA; Vamba Sherif in Amsterdam, Holland; Ayesha Harruna Attah in Dakar, Senegal; Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse in Bordeaux, France; Max Lobé in Geneva, Switzerland; Masande Ntshanga in Cape Town, South Africa; Mubanga Kalimamukwento in Minneapolis, USA; Tsitsi Dangarembga in Harare, Zimbabwe; Leila Aboulela in Edinburgh, Scotland; Virgília Ferrão in Maputo, Mozambique; and José Eduardo Agualusa in Lisbon, Portugal.
The Sunday sessions started with Tanella Boni streaming from Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire before Molara Wood in Lagos, Nigeria took over. Molara Wood, who has written widely on the arts for nearly two decades, is the author of Indigo (2013) a collection of short stories. She won the inaugural John La Rose Short Story Competition and also received a Commonwealth Broadcasting Association award for her fiction. She is a former arts columnist for the Nigerian Guardian and also worked as Arts & Culture editor of NEXT, the newspaper founded by Pulitzer Prize winner Dele Olojede. She currently works as Chief Editor for Ouida Books and the One Read Africa initiative.
Molara Wood, looking resplendent in white, started her session by reading from her book Indigo before welcoming her host Renee Edwige Dro. Audience members who before today had seen her as mainly an editor experienced Molara Wood as a writer which was a thing of beauty. With the reading concluded, the debates focused on several topics. These encompassed the conflict her writing has with all these other disciplines that she is involved in, how she was convinced by a friend to start running her new podcast (check it out here) in spite of the Covid-19 pandemic effects on her psyche, and her only sin being neither poetry nor cocaine but Chanel.
You can watch the whole session below.
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