Terra Crioula, Portuguese Africa’s new literary magazine, seeks your submissions 

A new literary magazine called Terra Crioula is seeking out flash fiction, poetry, and short stories from Portuguese speaking African writers.

This blog has never been famous for its highlighting of Portuguese language fiction from the continent. We will cover what could be considered the usual suspects from the three or four countries that speak Portuguese mainly Angola and Mozambique. This we will do with features on folks like Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa winning the Dublin International Literary Award 2017 for his novel A General Theory of Oblivion. Or Mozambican Lucílio Manjate winning the Eduardo Costley-White literary prize and Mia Couto being longlisted for the aforementioned Dublin International Literary Award.

Apart from these, there is very really little reportage coming from this blog sadly. There is a good reason for this. This blog is run by an English speaking individual and it is not very easy to follow all the different languages of the continent let alone English. There is a lot happening and it’s not easy to keep up; this is a full-time job. Another reason is that there is no single place where one can follow Lusophone literature to know are players and who is coming through in the industry.

You can imagine my excitement when I was tagged on a post on my Facebook about a new project recently for a new Portuguese Africa’s literary magazine created to promote Lusophone literature and culture. The new magazine is called Terra Crioula (Google translates this to “Creole earth”) and the first edition with the theme “Independência” will be launching on January 2018.  It excites me as finally, I may have a place where I can read writing from our Portuguese speaking writers.

So if you are an African (read black) writer based in Portuguese Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Cape Verde, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe, the new magazine is looking for original and bold literary works for the first edition in English or Portuguese. The good folks at the magazine are looking for flash fiction (up to 500 words), poetry (up to 2) and short stories (up to 4,000 words) around the “Independência” theme.