Veronique Tadjo will headline the Ake Arts & Book Festival 2022 which runs in Abeokuta, Nigeria from November 24-26, 2022. The announcement was made on Wednesday, October 12, 2022.
The Ake Arts & Book Festival, popularly known as the Ake Festival, has been running in Nigeria since 2012. Lovers of books and the arts attend book readings, panel discussions, poetry recitals, film screenings, theatre and music performances and lots more over the week of the festival. On July 12, the team organising the festival announced the theme for the year as “Generational Discordance” and the dates to be October 28-30.
One of the most important announcements relating to this event is the revelation of the year’s headliner. Some of the previous headliners have been Wole Soyinka, Niyi Osundare, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nuruddin Farah, Maryse Condé, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Abdulrazak Gurnah.
The festival returns to its spiritual home of Abeokuta after a few years in the bright lights of Lagos. The team running it has announced its headliner to be Côte d’Ivoire writer, poet, novelist, and artist from Véronique Tadjo. The honorary professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg has written many books principally in French which have been translated into many languages. For those who read in English, some of her titles available in translation are As The Crow Flies (20010, The Shadow of the Imana (2002), Queen Pokou (2005), Far From My Father (2014), and Amour: Fields Of Battle, Fields of Love. Her most recent title In The Company of Men (2021) was awarded the Lost Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction in April 2022.
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