Authors
Rafeeat Aliyu was born and raised in Nigeria. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. Her work has been long listed for the Writivism Short Story Prize, Nommo Awards and the Island Prize for Debut Fiction. She received the Norwescon Scholarship to attend the Clarion West Workshop for science fiction and fantasy writers in 2018 and benefitted from the AKO Caine Prize Online with Vimbai mentorship program. Rafeeat is a 2023 Morland Writing Scholar. Her writing has been supported by La Napoule Art Foundation International Residency and La Maison Baldwin. Her works have been widely published in anthologies such as the Caine Prize: A Mind to Silence and Other Stories, Dominion, Africanfuturism, and AfroSF, and in the magazines Omenana, Fiyah, Lolwe, Strange Horizons, and Nightmare, to name a few.
On Descendants of Balance
It started with an idea; write short speculative stories inspired by different eras of Nigerian history. Past, present, and future, reimagined. I wanted to retell Yoruba folktales, classic horror of early Nollywood VHS tapes, urban myths, and celebrity culture. I decided on eight stories and assigned a time period for each. I labelled the first draft of the story you’re about to read “middle history”. As with most of my other works, it brings together disparate elements. This story is what happens when my creative mind brings together “Benin Empire”, “Ile Ife”, “deer woman” and a random dream that visited me years ago.
Let’s start with the Benin Empire and Ile Ife. The former is an ancient kingdom that expanded around the 11th century and is renowned for its wealth, artistic heritage, and advanced governance. Ile Ife is said to be the earliest Yoruba state. According to Yoruba lore, the city is not only the birthplace of all Yoruba people but the cradle of humanity itself. Ile Ife has also produced stunning artworks and complex systems. The history of both kingdoms and peoples is long and intertwined, and I wanted to explore it by setting a story within the intersection. I thought of a foreign woman within the Benin Empire. But it wasn’t enough that she was apparently Yoruba, what if she wasn’t human?
You’ve probably come across this story before. The heroine is a woman whose true form is not human. She is beautiful and has mysterious powers. She captures the attention of a man. The hero is a king or a hunter or destitute. He manages to marry this magical woman usually by tricking her. They live together for a while before something happens and she must return to her true form. According to an article on starmythworld(.)com, Oya (the Yoruba deity of storms and winds) was an antelope who shed her skin to interact with humans in the market. Sango (the Yoruba deity of victory) saw Oya and was captivated by her beauty. He managed to steal her antelope skin and made her his wife.
My heroine, Oronsen, is named for Queen Oronsen, a deity revered by the people of Owo, Ondo state. Queen Oronsen was a magical woman who married King Rerengejen some 600 years ago. Theirs was true love and it was because of this connection that the Queen revealed her godlike origins. She gave her King rules to follow if he wanted her to stay by his side (no grinding okra for stew, no spilling water in the courtyard, no bringing firewood directly from the farm). Should any of her taboos be broken, Queen Oronsen would no longer remain at his side. The King agreed. However, jealousy festered in the royal household leading to the other queens breaking all of Queen Oronsen’s rules. She fled. Her King found her in the forest. There’s a bit where he begged her to return. Queen Oronsen refused, but she promised to bless his people if they honoured her with an annual festival, the Igogo festival held every September.
I borrowed not just the queen’s name but the legendary love she felt for her husband. Oral history gave me a name for another character, Lakange. Lakange is the mother of Oranmiyan according to Ulli Beier’s Yoruba Myths. In his version, Oduduwa the King of Ife was an albino, and his son Ogun was very dark-skinned. Ogun fought the war of Ogotun successfully and took many prisoners. He kept the beautiful Lakange for himself, however, when his father heard of this, Oduduwa sent his servants to seize Lakange for himself. The child that came out of these unions was Oranmiyan. It is said that Oranmiyan travelled across the landscape that is southern Nigeria, settling in many places, marrying several women. I’m not as interested in stories of influential men, but I wanted to reimagine the captive slave woman’s story.
Finally, “dream”. I was once told by an editor that dreams aren’t the best place to write from. I get it, dream logic can be hard to follow, but dreams can be pretty interesting. Here’s what I saw while asleep: A woman is sitting on a stool in an outdoor kitchen. The setting is rural, no, rustic… actually it appears pre-colonial. A small creature zooms past her heading for the fireplace. The woman can see it but pretends not to. This is the part I kept revisiting over the years, so I won’t bore you with other details from the dream. It would become the first scene of Oronsen’s story (but not in the version you’re about to read).
‘Descendants of Balance’ took several turns to get to ZamaShort. It’s about a magical woman who finds love and ends up shirking her responsibilities to the forest she came from. It’s about magic. It’s about sisterhood. It’s about a world where human and the supernatural lived together, and about how that world came to be separated.
I hope you enjoy spending time in Oronsen’s world!
Find more from Rafeeat at her website: https://www.rafeeataliyu.com/
And at her substack: https://rafeeat.substack.com/
Released: 1st June 2026.
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Chisom Umeh is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. When he's not watching movies or writing about fantastical things, he's tweeting about movies and fantastical things at izom_chisom. His short stories have been featured in Omenana, Apex, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, Mythaxis, Scifi Shorts, and elsewhere. His short story, ‘Ancestor’s Gift’ won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest and is winner of the 2025 Nommo Awards for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story for ‘From Across Time’.
MAKING SURVIVAL
I think a lot about access, especially as it pertains to short fiction writing. How the barrier to entry is often so high when you’re starting out that you almost give up submitting to pro magazines, or you settle for non-paying ones, which are also difficult to get into, but at least present a better chance of accepting your work. Just to get your name out there. Foot in the door.
You have to really be passionate about storytelling to come back to submission portals with a new story in hand after previously getting a painful, form rejection, having waited anxiously for three months or more to hear back. The temptation to say “Fuck this shit, I’m done,” is often so high. In fact, many times, you’re going to say just that. I did. But if you have some love for the craft as I do, you’re going to eat your words many times and show up unashamed, stain on your nose.
It’s crazy.
The first iteration of ‘Fly, Flightless’ was written two years ago for an anthology. I had seen a call for submissions like two months prior and it was one of those calls where more than half the slots had already been filled with established authors. They needed like five or six regular writers to publish alongside the popular ones. Most of the writers there were my faves. People who had written books that were dear to my heart. The thought of sharing a table of contents with them made me really excited, so I got down to writing the best story I thought I could. I believed what I came up with afterwards was a work of pure genius. Something I was really proud of.
The masterpiece got rejected, of course. No surprises there. Dreams shattered. I kept an eye on the anthology though. When they published the final TOC, I realized that the writers they had accepted were almost as popular as the ones already announced. So, I started asking myself what exactly gave me the audacity to think I could ever get accepted into such an anthology. What was I thinking? Who was I?
As a short fiction writer, when you’re just starting out, you have to crawl on your hands and knees. You take whatever you get. Your prospects improve over the years as your writing gets better and you develop an eye for what magazines want, but only so slightly. You’re still going to be waking and sleeping on a squeaky mattress made from rejection letters.
Just a few days ago, I submitted my story to a magazine and the submissions tracker informed me that mine was the 1058th submission in the queue. What are the odds that what I’ve written is good enough to best 1000+ other entries? These are the kinds of daunting odds you have to contend with daily if you wish to publish in pro or semipro magazines. At some point, you’ll have to ask yourself how sustainable this is. If you really want to make a living from this, then what you’re going to make wouldn’t be much of a living. It’ll be more like surviving. Making survival, if you may.
Don’t get me wrong. These are the same tough odds you’ll also face when hunting for a job or doing many other things these days in our twenty-first century reality. Still, the job market is filled with hundreds, if not thousands of options for you to pick from. Submitting to many places at once greatly improves your chances. How many such venues are there in the short fiction market that are willing to pay you anything significant enough to live by? The answer to that question is a very small number.
In general, as a creative writer (poet, screenwriter, novelist, whatever) the odds of surviving on your earnings are crazily small. But at least, as a novelist, if you get an agent and manage to publish your first book with a decent publisher, you have some sort of security publishing-wise. There’s some assurance that you’re going to keep getting your books out and getting paid for them. Your publisher could like you enough to buy your next three books. And if they don’t, your agent would still be there to fight for you and ensure you get another publisher. Not so in the short fiction ecosystem. If you do the hustle long enough, you may get to that place where magazines solicit stories from you. And you, alongside other “established writers”, fill up TOCs even before anthologies are announced publicly. But the chances of ever getting there are as slim as your bank account will be if you do get there and think you’ve arrived somewhere.
I wish there were hundreds of pro-paying speculative fiction magazines out there to enable everyone to get a decent chance at well-paid publication. But, unfortunately, we don’t live in that world. The few venues that exist are struggling under the weight of myriad problems: lack of funding, proliferation of AI-generated “stories”, constantly changing publishing landscape, and more.
After the rejection, I kept my masterpiece to myself, tinkering with it over the years till it transmogrified into something new. Whether this new version resembles a piece written by a master is left for you, discerning readers, to decide. But I’m happy it has found a home with a wonderful publication. And at least I get to continue the hustle of writing and hoping my work finds its readers.
You can find Chisom here:
Twitter: https://x.com/izom_chisom
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'Fly, Flightless' Released 1st May 2026.
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Writing gave me cohesion in an oftentimes maddening world. In middle-age I have turned to faith, God, and the religious instructions of both Christianity and Islam. I have even briefly turned to the Islamic faith trying to find my reason for being here on Earth. Even at what I consider this late stage of my writing life, I question everything. The Palestinian genocide hit the hardest and resulted in my latest book Songs For Palestine: Struggle Poems. But there are two sides in war and no side wins. There is always the aftermath of psychological damage. My journey is just beginning, and I have many interests in religion, theology, biblical study, the Essenes, Eastern mysticism, the poetry of Rumi and Khalil Gibran, the prophetic writings of Credo Mutwa and the Bleek archives.
I started writing when I was eight years old, I was also a diarist, with notebooks filled with melancholic poetry and drawings. Suffice to say that was also the time I had my first major episode of depression which would later escalate to mania and hypomania later in my life. In my teenage years I had developed into a poet but had also completely withdrawn from my peer group and my family life at home. In school, I had no friends and was severely bullied by both the teachers and the pupils in a public Model C school system. I was confronted by White, Black, and Coloured faces, on a daily basis, who had no time for me. I faced the same at home. I had a dysfunctional family life. My father was a brilliant manic-depressive educationalist, scholar, writer, and academic, and my mother, too, was bright and athletic, but also, unfortunately, mentally ill and undiagnosed for all her life. Home life was not so fun but my father—in my twenties and thirties—proofread early drafts of my short stories.
It was my mother who had recognised my talent for writing early on. She acquired a manual typewriter for me from her school, Chapman Senior Secondary School. Later, one Saturday afternoon, when I was twelve years old, my dad and I went to Macro to buy me my first electric typewriter. My home life was hell. Sometimes my mother would give my father the cold shoulder or they would argue. I have a younger brother who I am close to. He is the youngest in the family and has struggled with addiction. I have a sister, the middle child who passes for white and studied at UCT. She visits us once a year at Christmas. We are not close. For example, she has deleted me from all her socials and excluded me from her life as have other family members. There are cousins and uncles and aunts whom I have not spoken to or interacted with in decades. My father for the most part was gone and would return late at night after attending meetings as a community leader. People would come to him and ask his advice for the further education of their children.
I come from a family of educationalists, but if I wasn’t a writer and a poet, I would be a filmmaker or a clinical psychologist.
There were only two job opportunities available for my mother in the brutal and violent regime of apartheid South Africa, and that was to become a teacher or a nurse.
My writing is infused with mental illness. I am bipolar. That is my diagnosis. It’s become easier with time to understand the genetic makeup of the illness that has blurred the lines and edges of my life. Every single act of betrayal from my mother, my sister, my brother, and my father, has entered the spaces of my poetry, every short story, every novel, every personal essay. When I write about Emily Dickinson or Bessie Head, I become Emily Dickinson and I become Bessie Head. When I write about Rainer Maria Rilke, I become Rainer Maria Rilke. I become Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, effortlessly moving between the worlds and the dimensions of two genders.
My mother encouraged me, but she did not say the words that I was always and still am longing to hear. That she loved me. That she was proud of me. She makes it a point never to read anything that I have written. She has her own reasons. My mother was a woman who read Barbara Taylor Bradford and Danielle Steele novels. However difficult and strained our relationship is, it was my mother who took me to my first psychiatrist, a Dr Amaladoss, who studied in Vienna, Austria, when I was 16 years old. He wanted to hospitalise me. He put me on schizophrenic medication. I think my first diagnosis might have been schizoaffective disorder. I still found a way out of madness. Writing saved me. My mother saved me. My father saved me. But more damage was to come. Hospitalisation after hospitalisation in my twenties and thirties. A nervous breakdown in Johannesburg at my first job at a top television production company in my early twenties. I couldn’t cope, so I came home to Gqeberha, previously known as Port Elizabeth. I began to care for my father. I became a companion to him. When my father landed in a wheelchair, I cooked and cleaned for him. I bathed him. I fed him on the days he couldn’t get out of bed. All this time, the only people who were in contact with me were editors from around the world. My brother, who is six years younger than I am, published my first book, a thin poetry volume, Africa Where Art Thou which was followed by Feeding the Beasts, another poetry collection and Winter In Johannesburg, which was a collection of short stories.
My mother, sister, and brother’s, mental cruelty was ongoing for three decades. I coped. I had a desk. I had a computer. When I didn’t have a computer, I had a cellular phone. I poured my heart and soul into whatever I embarked upon. I understood the pain of war, genocide, invasion, dysfunctional family life, and chronic illness. It understood me. You see, it wasn’t just facing the daily struggle of being confronted by stigma in my own home. My father and I were connected by the tragic existence of the despair of major suicidal depression in both our lives. I looked at Virginia Woolf who drowned herself in the River Ouse, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Petya Dubarova, Karin Boye, and Ingrid Jonker. I began to look at the patterns in their lives and how those same patterns overlapped in my own. I knew that somehow I had to save myself. No one was coming to save me. I knew that what I was suffering from had a name, manic-depression, bipolar. I also knew that I kind of had a cure at my disposal. The writing game. The muse, the muse, the beloved muse.
Writing was a sign from God. This not only gave meaning to my life, the writing of poetry, but it also gave me a reason to live, a purpose and I could heal myself, and others. My father, my beloved father, writing was something that we shared. Writing was something that no one could take away from me, no matter what they said about me. I have been called mad in my life. I have been hurt in the church. I have faced stigma from my paternal and maternal family, from the church, from the community, from my immediate family, even, at times rejection and alienation. I have faced abandonment and neglect in childhood at the hands of my mother, who I now realise had her own fair share of problems. These days, I stay out of her way. We live in the same house. She did what she could for me to the best of her ability and I don’t blame her anymore. I can’t. It was my mother who gave me poetry. It was God, truly, really who gave me the gift, but it was my mother who drove me on Friday afternoons to my Speech and Drama lessons with freckled “whiteys” during apartheid. I was the only Coloured child in the hall reciting Shakespeare at a tender age. You see, my mother could pass for white, Afrikaans, just like now my sister could. Against them, I didn’t stand a chance, so I turned to my father and in his embrace, their winter turned to summertime.
And in poetry I found a sea of wildflowers, the Dominican sea of Jean Rhys. I found a bed on which I could rest the vessel of my body. Tears would often pour out of me at night, leaving me breathless, or half deranged with all the negativity in my environment. My tears would turn into rain. I would insert that word in my poetry. It would become code. And, yes, in so many words. That is what poetry is to me; it is written from my heart and my psychological framework. It is code. With this code, and my father's embrace, for he is the one who truly loved me, I have survived the pains of my life.
Dear Reader, I wrote ‘Did you get Married to Her when I was in the Mental Hospital’ as a response to the pivotal stage where I am right now in my life.
Thank you for taking the time to read my words.
Find Abigail and her works here:
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Released 1st April 2026.
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Hussani Abdulrahim is a Nigerian writer. He has a degree in Pure Chemistry from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. Hussani’s short story ‘Arewa Boys’, which won the Toyin Falola Prize (2022), was shortlisted for the 2024 ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award. He won the 2023 Writivism Short Story Prize, Ibua Journal’s 2023 Bold Call, and the 2016 Green Author Prize. He has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Afritondo Prize, Boston Review’s Aura Estrada Short Fiction Contest, and the BWR Summer Fiction Contest. He was a participant in the Flame Tree Writers’ Workshop co-facilitated by award-winning writers Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and Chika Unigwe in 2024. He also participated in the 2025 Kokonut Head Media Virtual Residency Programme. Hussani’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Wilted Pages, Ubwali Literary Magazine, Tasteful: A Literary Cannibal Anthology, Brave New Weird Anthology (Tenebrous Press), Brittle Paper, Evergreen Review, Solarpunk, Ibua Journal, The Flametree Project, and Afritondo Prize anthologies. He lives in Kano, Nigeria, and is working on both a novel and a short story collection.
The Magic of Titles
I can’t remember exactly why I wrote ‘Gold-Plated Boy’ or how the flesh of the story came to me, but one thing I recall vividly is that the title was the first thing I jotted down, before all other aspects of the story fell into place.
When I was informed that I would be required to write this note, I began to wonder how one writes about a creative work they have written, or about the creative process itself. This is why I find this task somewhat demanding, because I pride myself on being a storyteller—nothing more. Everything that comes out of me is a result of a basic desire to tell a good story. In this regard, I’d say I am a lot like Cyprian Ekwensi.
But let’s stick to the script.
In writing this, I had to return to where the title of my story originated. I knew it came from a short story written by someone else, but I couldn’t remember who wrote it, as I had never actually read the story, even though the title fascinated me. I searched using the keywords “Coin-Operated Boy”, and Google only gave me details about a song and an animated short film I didn’t even know existed. What I was looking for, however, I eventually found on X. It clicked that this was where I had first come across the title ‘Coin-Operated Boy’, a short story written by Aia Järvinen and published in Issue 014 of Dark Matter Magazine.
It was somewhat odd that, until that moment, I had never thought to read the story whose title had inspired mine. The story, set in a post-apocalyptic world, focuses on human survivors after an unspecified, world-ending disaster. Cora, the main character, fixates her attention on a mechanical boy housed in a glass cabinet. The figure, with its shiny texture and colourful outfit, represents a striking contrast to the toxic, grey reality around her.
In comparison, Coin-Operated Boy, the song by The Dresden Dolls written by Amanda Palmer, depicts a narrator yearning for a relationship without complications. The mechanical boy is employed as a metaphor for emotional escapism, the desire to be with someone who can be controlled and managed.
Meanwhile, in the animated short film Coin Operated by Nicholas Arioli, we find a boy who spends all his life selling lemonade to save coins, all in pursuit of fulfilling his dream of riding a rocket machine into space, one which he discovered in a grocery store as a child.
On one hand, it was fascinating to encounter these independent works, each using different mediums to convey their messages, yet all connected by a unifying thread: the mechanical. The mechanical becomes a medium through which deep human emotions can flower, revealing our wants and vulnerabilities. I find this thread to be present in my story, ‘Gold-Plated Boy’, as well.
On the other hand, I felt a brief sense of worry. It seemed almost careless that I hadn’t done this small bit of research before writing my story, and I wondered if ‘Gold-Plated Boy’ might have followed a different trajectory had I done so. Perhaps a sentence here or a paragraph there could have made way for something entirely distinct. I dismissed this thought quickly. If anything, I take pride in having created something worthwhile from a simple fascination with someone else’s title. To now discover this broad connection, spanning multiple media, is a joy to behold—something magical. It shows that even when we don’t intend to, our ideas find siblings, both near and far, alluding to the fact that no art exists in a vacuum.
As for the mechanics of writing ‘Gold-Plated Boy’, they are not something I can now clearly remember. Yes, the idea metamorphosed from a chance encounter with the title of Aia Järvinen’s story, but how the main components came together—the idea of Nigerian buka food vendors using culinary droids not only to improve the quality of their meals but also as a side attraction—is now lost to me. However, I must credit writers like Lesley Nneka Arimah and Pemi Aguda for showing me that one can dream up a world and make it believable. It is from the worlds they themselves have imagined that the spark for my own instinct to write stories, stories that are unique and shaped as I wish them to be, was ignited.
As for my writing routine, I’m not much of a routine person. I write best when a story wants to be written, when a sentence begs to be put down on the page. I often find myself waiting for those moments, anticipating the metaphorical itch. Words have found me so far, and I trust that they will continue to do so.
Lastly, I want to thank Aia Järvinen for writing ‘Coin-Operated Boy’, because ‘Gold-Plated Boy’ might not have been born otherwise. I thank The Dresden Dolls for singing Coin-Operated Boy. I thank Nicholas Arioli for the 2017 animated short film Coin Operated. I thank them all for the magic of titles—for in our small worlds, across texts, lyrics, and visuals, across oceans and landscapes, and across time, we are a legion.
Find Hussani here:
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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abdulrahim.hussani
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Released 1st March 2026.
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Daniel Joe is an emerging African writer based in Lagos, Nigeria. He is an English Lit. undergraduate at the Iconic Open University, and once a fellow at the SprinNG literary fellowship. His work has been published in several literary magazines and anthologies, including The Poetry Journal's Her Father's Daughter, Brittle Paper, Afritondo, The Rising Phoenix and more. When he isn't writing or reading, he spends his time playing, or watching football, or scouring Lagos on foot searching for inspiration.
On Writing
I still remember the day I fell in love with literature. I was twelve at the time. On a Saturday, home alone and bored out of my mind, I began ransacking the whole house for something, anything to do. Somehow, I got to my sister's room of all places and began combing through her bookshelf. A shelf filled with novels and dramas, like Ngozi Chimamanda and William Shakespeare. Names that made my insides churn with angst. So why on earth I was even doing this, I still have no idea or theory to explain it. None whatsoever. But, for whatever reason, I kept at it, until I came across this little book with a cover that had drawings of so many things on it—from books to a ball, headphones to pens, and so much more. On it was written, The Last Days at Forcados High School. Reluctantly I sat on the floor, just in front of the shelf, and opened it up. I started by reading the preambles the way a tortoise might. Building some kind of tension inside, as if I was slowly on the verge of discovering a new continent. I could see my hands shaking as I got to the first chapter. It felt quite surreal meeting this boy named Jimi Solade. A boy I couldn't see, couldn't point to. And yet, in less than five minutes I was completely engrossed in his life. I wanted to know everything that happened to him, and his friends. I think I finished that book within thirty minutes and then read it again with the same ferocity.
Afterwards, I went outside and began walking, not really paying attention to my destination, just thinking. Thinking about the boy I had just met, the life I had just witnessed, wondering what I would have done in some of the situations, questioning the plight of his father, his friends, pondering about how it would feel, what it would mean to lose someone who had known you all your life, before you could even conceive of yourself. I was ravaged with it. Ravaged with a life that did not exist. But I was excited, it was the first time I could remember that something had made me care so deeply, to think, to question things, personal and societal. Also, at the end of that walk, a desire was created. A desire to create, to create a world that left me with that same ineffable feeling, to create something that left me with that same intent to question, to think, to just be.
Now, I would like to say that I immediately went in search of how it was that people made such things, what methods were taken, what things were required, but the truth is, I did nothing of the sort. Rather, I spent years telling myself I was not the kind of person who could, the kind of person smart enough to write such a thing, to engage with literature. Of course, I kept on reading, but slowly, I suppressed that desire, till it was nowhere to be found.
Years later, a few days after my own mother died, I read Ngozi Chimamanda's The Thing Around Your Neck. A collection of short stories. In my tired and lethargic state, I ghosted through it like light through a fog. I don't know if it was the first time I had ever seen this type of fiction, but it was the first time I took notice. The beauty of a short story, the texture, the massiveness wrapped in something so small, and so many all at once. In a flash, a bang, it rekindled that feeling of so long ago. That desire to create, to engage with literature as if my life depended on it. But again, I tried to suppress it. I blocked the memories of being commended by teachers and people on things I had for one reason or the other, written. I told myself once again, that I need not be deluded, I need not believe such nonsense, as if they were all conspiring to trick me, people who had most times never even met each other.
Thankfully, it did not dissipate this time. It stayed, quiet, hovering, like a tiny white rope off a roof. And about two weeks later, the day after my mother was buried, I woke up with an anvil the size of a whale on my chest, or at least it felt that way. I couldn't stop thinking about that book, about its form, about the things it said. I wanted to do something like it, create something with that form. And whether, because of the scent of death, or just the reminder of so much of our fears, so much of fear itself, being quite stupid, I decided on something many around me called deluded. I decided to forego my training in Sociology, to forego all common routes, common sense, I finally decided to pursue literature no matter what. I began to write, even to approach magazines. I looked for fellowships, went in search of a degree in something most people said had no value in my country, my society, and even beyond.
To be honest, I had no idea, if things would turn out alright, if I even really had the talent for it, I still have no clear idea. I mean, maybe no one ever publishes me, maybe no one ever reads my stuff, I don't know, but what I do know is, I always want to put my heart and soul in this, I want to continuously find out if I can, creating things that ignite that feeling of so, so long ago.
Released 1st February 2026.
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Bongani Sibanda is a novelist and short story writer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of the collection of short stories, Grace and Other Stories (Weaver Press, 2016), and the children’s fantasy novels, Jimmy and the Giant Insects and The Goat that Refused to be Slaughtered. He has published short stories in magazines and literary journals such as Munyori, Lolwe, Kalahari Review, and many others. In 2018, he attended the Caine Prize workshop held in Gisenyi Rwanda, where he wrote the story ‘Ngozi’, which was published in the Caine Prize anthology, Redemption Song and Other Stories. In 2015, he was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize for his story ‘Musoke’, a fictionalised account of the Ugandan rebel, Dominic Ongwen.
On ‘Everyone is a Robot until Proven Otherwise’ and more
I grew up in a small, remote village in rural Zimbabwe. There were no books, no TV, and even the school ones were torn and missing pages. The only thing that satisfied my curiosity was an illustrated Watchtower Bible. I loved the story of Samson and Delilah, David and Goliath, and how Jephtha commanded the sun to stop while he fought a war.
At grade five, my parents split and I moved to my maternal grandparents where, luckily, one of my uncles was a reader and had Zulu and Ndebele novels in abundance. I read everything there was, and at one point began to wonder where such interesting stories came from. When my aunty told me that someone like me writes them, I began to write mine on that day. The first was in grade five, at Nyashongwe Primary School, a story titled, ‘It’s Unknown what Fattened Pig’, which is a Ndebele idiom warning parents about discriminating against children as you never know who will look after you in old age. This was a little protest directed at my grandparents, and the longhand manuscripts disappeared under my late grandmother’s bed.
Throughout primary and high school, the writing continued, but there was no guidance, no clear route to publication, and everything I wrote disappeared.
As someone who came of age in the late 2000s, during Zimbabwe’s worst political and economic crisis, there was no money for university after high school, no job prospects in Zimbabwe, and like everyone else I headed south soon after writing my last high school paper.
The short-term goal was to work a year, save enough to go to university but it didn’t work. I ended up in Johannesburg, working as a gardener while using the pen to try and escape poverty, a feat that hasn’t worked so far, and I would not advise anybody to try.
I published my first book, Grace and Other Stories, in 2016 through Weaver Press, Harare. In 2018, I self-published Jimmy and the Giant Insects, a children’s fantasy novel.
While Zimbabwe is riddled with poverty, South Africa has its own demons. Freedom is limited if you are a Black from neighbouring countries. Blacks are warring due to entrenched inequality. I have never been illegal in South Africa, but I have been arrested and detained more than three times, accused of being in the country illegally, and required to produce my passport—a document one cannot carry all the time in a country one has lived in for more than fifteen years and considers home.
I conceived the story ‘Everyone is a Robot Until Proven Otherwise’ while detained. It is an allegory of the harassment of Black foreign nationals by vigilante groups like Operation Dudula in Johannesburg, with a tacit approval of the government. The tragedy is that everyone is being stopped to show their passports, even South African citizens, especially darker skinned ones as this is associated with Blacks from neighbouring countries. One must pay a bribe or risk getting your time wasted.
Release 1st Jan 2026.
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Tabitha Wanja Mwangi is a mother of three lovely people that give her joy and strength to keep going. She has spent most of her life in a university setting, learning, teaching, and now as an administrator. Her first published works were scientific journal articles, and she later became a freelance science journalist, writing pieces that make health research accessible to general audiences while highlighting the contributions of local researchers. She has written for the Daily Nation (Kenya’s leading newspaper), Msafiri (Kenya Airways flight magazine), and The Conversation, as well as her blog, Tabitha on Health. Her first book, 12 Remarkable African Life Scientists, profiles scientists from Sub-Sahara Africa, with the aim of inspiring young people across the continent to consider careers in the life sciences. Tabitha has also published fiction, contributing short stories to the African Roar anthology, Spark anthology and The Matatu Journal.
I have loved books since I was in primary school. My greatest frustration was the state of the books in the library in my hometown which often had pages missing. As soon as I started to earn a bit of money, I invested in books and continue to do so—much to my children’s annoyance as the living room is stuffed with books that I simply can’t bear to get rid of.
Although I love stories, I am hopeless at telling a story face-to-face, the punchlines just never land! So, when I published short fiction later in life, I was super thrilled—at least I can tell a good story in writing!
My short stories are mainly about women or girls having a tough time, some managing to pull through and others not so lucky. I can’t help writing about issues that bug me, and so, my stories are often rather heavy. However, ‘The Offertory’ came together at a particularly difficult time of my life, when I needed something cheerful and I surprised myself with my first light-hearted story.
The story was inspired by a wish to write about the manipulative, coercive, and unhealthy, leadership that I observed and experienced in some Christian churches and gatherings. I created this town I named Mchungaji, which translates to shepherd/herder but also pastor/priest, and created characters that acted in ways that will sound familiar to those embedded in certain Christian organisations. OK, that does sound very serious—but I found a way to make it light and silly enough to put a smile on my face.
I had not intended to bring any politicians into the story but when I was researching about noise laws in Kenya (churches in Kenya like to turn up the volume), I came across information on the late John Michuki and was rather pleased to be able to use it in the story. He was the most efficient minister in the government of his close friend, the late Mwai Kibaki, who was the third president of the republic of Kenya. Michuki’s first position in President Kibaki’s government was as Minister of Transport and Communications. He was determined to bring order to the unruliest sector of public transport in the country, the matatu (minibus) business. Along with other citizens, I rolled my eyes in disbelief when he said that matatus would not be allowed to overload and everyone would be required to use seatbelts. To our utter amazement, his toughness worked and citizens choose to walk rather than use matatus that did not adhere to the new rules, popularly known as “Michuki Rules”. As a result of that public support, the matatu industry caved in to the safety regulations.
President Kibaki then moved Michuki to the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources. Michuki told us that he would make Nairobi River so clean, we would be fishing from it. Fish in that smelly, polluted river seemed totally impossible, but Michuki managed to do just that!
When it came to noisy church gatherings, discos, and such, he did start to get church leaders flustered but this is not an agenda he pushed with as much zest as the others. There was a lightness to his approach, as though a bit wary of meddling in people’s faith. But perhaps, he just did not get the time he needed to tackle this issue. We will never know, as he passed away while in this ministry.
Michuki is the one minister that I remember truly acting for the good of the public without holding back. I am not saying he was perfect. Michuki was known to be super-efficient but also ruthless when he had a goal in mind and is famously quoted as saying, “If you rattle a snake, be prepared to be bitten”. He was no angel, but who is?
Back to the Christian church.
As a practising believer, I am aware of people’s fear of pushing for change in any Christian gathering. The fear of being labelled as someone working against the “Man of God”, having been sent by the devil to “sow seeds of disunity”. The fear of being ostracised and losing the close family bonds that these gatherings provide, or even that people will wish and pray for evil to befall you, or even rain curses on you! This fear, sown deliberately by some Christian leaders, means that when we see things we know do not align with Christ’s teachings, we quietly move away or grit our teeth and pretend to agree with what is happening.
Sometimes when I look at the behaviour of some Christian leaders, I often wonder whether they really believe in God at all. I mean, how would you feel if your family doctor, always eager to prescribe you medicines, never gave the same medication to their unwell children, preferring to take them to faith healers. What if none of their children were vaccinated? What would you think about vaccinations and medicines? So, if people who claim to know God do the exact opposite of what the spirit of the main textbook says, what does that tell you? These leaders are obsessed with power and control—the exact opposite of the Christ they are supposed to be following. Pastors slap, hit, and throw things at their followers. This is physical assault. Others sexually molest women and children. Others openly disdain poor people and pressure their followers to do whatever they can to bring money to their church. Some insist on money for prayers, doing this on our television screens with absolutely no shame. Their worship of money and the public display of wealth borders on the ridiculous.
I am not sure how long congregations on the African continent are going to continue to allow this manipulation to grow in their midst. Why do we feel that we must leave our brains at the doorstep of the church on our way in and pick them on our way out? When will we return to the simple faith that is not about concentrating power to a few “People of God” who coerce and control us just so that they can be rich? Bear in mind that the rebellion led by one man, Martin Luther, in the 1400s led to the protestant movement. His biggest issue was money for prayers—how little has changed. We are right back to that place again, but where is the Martin Luther movement of this generation?
It is hard to talk about the church on the African continent without getting preachy, but I assure you, the story is not. Writing it brought a smile to my face many times, I hope it does the same for you. But also, that it can be added to the many thoughtful conversations we continue to have about the Church in Africa today.
Released 1st Dec 2025.
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T.L. Huchu’s work has appeared in Lightspeed, Interzone, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, The Year’s Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016, and elsewhere. He is the winner of a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (2023), Alex Award (2022), the Children’s Africana Book Award (2021), a Nommo Award for African SFF (2022, 2017), and has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize (2014) and the Grand prix de l'Imaginaire (2019). The fifth and final instalment of his Edinburgh Nights fantasy series is titled Secrets of the First School. Find him @TendaiHuchu.
Why I Wrote ‘When Two Sorcerers Collide’
Since 2017 I’ve been working on my Edinburgh Nights pentalogy. It has been my passion, my obsession, my salvation. This fantasy series has occupied my thoughts every day in one form or the other. I still remember when the muses gifted me this wonderful story and the world it’s set in. The first novel The Library of the Dead came out in 2021, and since then, I’ve dutifully released a sequel each year until the final instalment Secrets of the First School came out October 2025.
Writing a series can be gruelling work. You love it on certain days and on others you hate the damned thing and can’t wait to be done with it. I confess, I was keen to move on to something else—hopefully, something new and shiny. I’ve always experimented with different forms, genres, and styles. I guess I’m a commitment-phobe and this is the longest I’d spent fully embedded in one world. But as we inched towards the conclusion, I was struck by a certain kind of sorrow the likes of which I’d never hitherto experienced. This world I’d so lovingly created, these characters I’d conjured from thin air, these stories some readers were as passionate as I was about were coming to an end. Even before I finished the last book, I could feel a large void in my heart.
In 2024 in Stockholm, I was shown a fanfiction website where a reader of the series had written three of the most delightful tales, which expanded the world and filled in little gaps in the series. So, when I finished Secrets of the First School and Ivor, editor of ZamaShort, suggested I might do a piece on Melsie Mhondoro and Ian Callander, I jumped on the idea.
This story recounts their first ever encounter and I write it, not as the creator of the Edinburgh Nights series, but in the spirit of fanfiction. The series is done now—it’s set in stone. But in this story, I get to play around with the characters, this time placing them in the city of Harare where spooky things are happening. It was a lot of fun to work on and a panacea to the saudade that I’ve been dealing with since finishing the series. I can only hope you, dear reader, will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. — Tendai.
Released: 31st October 2025.
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Dare Segun Falowo is a writer in the Nigerian Weird. Their work draws on cinema, indigenous cosmologies, pulp fiction & a lived surreality. Their words have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Dark, Baffling, Omenana, and more. In 2018, they were longlisted for the Miles Morland Scholarship for African Writing. They have contributed to the essential anthologies of black speculative fiction: Dominion and Africa Risen. Their slipstream epic, ‘Convergence in Chorus Architecture’, was shortlisted for the Subjective Chaos Kind Of Awards and longlisted for the BSFA for Short Fiction. It was also translated into Italian by Zona42 (Convergenza nell’architettura del coro/Convergence in the Architecture of God), and Bengali by Joydhak Prakashan (Aagami Ratrir Upakhyant/Tales From The Other Night: Contemporary African Speculative Fiction). Their work appears in The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Vol. 2, and also in Horror Library 7 and the Were Tales Anthology, where they wrote as Baba Jide Low. Their debut collection of stories, Caged Ocean Dub released in 2023, and is published in the US, the UK, and Nigeria. They currently live in Lagos, Nigeria.
On ‘Sindi Fair’
The folktale is the lifeblood of the fairytale. Both are known as a realm of the uncanny and the weird, an avenue for a deep otherness and strangeness to flow through human stories and hold a mirror up to the truth of our spirit, the core of our hearts.
The indigenous folktale was passed down, tongue to tongue, to be told where children gather, used as a pedagogy of spirit and culture to archive ancestral experience, to open a lens of wonder and terror into their eyes.
Until something happened in Western time – the printing press was born, and the oral became textual. Books became the receptacle for the fluid, spoken form of folktale, and fairytales were born.
When the colonial hand entered Africa, a great erasure occurred. Indigenous traditions were destroyed forever by force and by new myths from the Bible. Our ancestral memory, woven into story, tucked in the crevices of our folktales, was blurred. What was erased we might never be able to fully know. Yet, even as most of our traditional art was carried away to be displayed in sterile museums, some things remained.
Words in mother tongues were translated, through the advent of education in English and its writing, into texts and small books. Those stories were made into forgotten television programs that tried to recall the old way of the folktale, recording child actors under big trees, listening to tales by moonlight. They entered the body of culture again, this time as symbols of what we once were, before the force of religion and the colonial folded our land and our lives into new, irreversible shapes.
We could feel the recognition, the poignant force and tickle in the recollected romps of ijapa, trickster tortoise, in tales of strange women who became deer and river, in stories of men who hung from trees and then became raging gods.
Somewhere in the orbiting of time towards the here and now, folktales, myths, and real ancestral lives, sifted into one other until they became a way of knowing who we once were and what we could be, even as we pursued a new architecture of linear lives, defined by Western vision and invasion.
Their fairytales came to us in moving pictures, in the orchestral whirl of Walt Disney – colour/song/film declaring a new type of folktale, to be found in the hypnosis of cinema. There we learned about “true love” - its myriad forms, its power to shift the world, to pull the dead back to life, to transform frogs into princes.
Our elders saw it as nonsense, simple white lies, but they let us gorge on its sugar, until we began to feel love’s ring as true, hoping to one day taste its lightning.
Emerging into adulthood and becoming aware that the queerness that coloured my blood pink was seen as a curse, especially when it existed in my black African body. A poisonous thing that lurked in the shadows. Something gruesome that happened to you like an accident, a deformity God didn’t give you. My dreams of love gradually went numb, entering deep into hibernation.
I now had to turn the energies I would have used to seek and nurture teenage love affairs, into hiding myself. To seeking comfort and knowledge in books, in choirs, in forest walks, in church work. The stern god of the colonial had brought his religion here to make us holy and clean, to remove the filth of native ways of seeing and feeling, and that came with the virulence of gender essentialism and homophobia.
To be an acceptable boy, I ironed out my curves, tried to become unsoft, hid the soprano, bared the teeth and the fist.
Still my body was found by the others, and I fell into trysts and barely-romances that lived shorter than the mayfly. I was looking for something that shone with the kindness of a good folktale, hoping that the fairytale’s happily-ever-after would stick to my life and my visions of love, which no amount of prayer could stop me from changing.
And the more I sought love, the more it seemed that the elders were right; love was for white bodies and those with wealth. There was nothing there for me.
Into university and the Real World, a new twist came upon my life, in the manifestation of invisible disability – an acute neurodivergence that worsened my social sensitivities until I became unable to understand reality, or go outside, or complete school. Romance was far away from me after a string of failures, yet a faith rung in me, even in my delirium, of the remaining possibility of love to bring magic and transcendence into ordinary lives.
To find a centre, I began to experiment with writing horror stories. These trial tales were adored. I then tried my hand at other writing things – fantasies, science fiction, soon I tipped into weirdness and slipperiness. Things got published in magazines and anthologies, enough to make a collection and seek its publication.
I left home.
My mind deteriorated.
I returned home.
And stopped writing.
A while after I returned to Lagos from Ibadan, I started to go out, attempting to forge new connections, but I always found myself rushing to get home (where I was suffocating but felt safe, bed-rotting) before a particular time. I couldn’t ignore the Cinderella of it all. The adjacent plunges into hell and returns to a lush ordinariness that constantly happened to my mind, reminded me of Persephone.
I began to write again – a fairytale, featuring those energies swirling around a pair of young men. This was possibly fostered by brief binges in the world of boys’ love television, and also a desire to bare my bones in text, since most of my older writing was situated around girls or women, and their generally heterosexual realities in relation with the common mystical and the indigenous metaphysical.
It was folkloric, and also gently mythical. Like a classic fantasy, it would be situated in West Africa but have no locations or names that could be traced to known cultures or languages in the region. There would be monarchy, gods, and domains. Beneath the surface, Cinderella and Persephone would dance. I was collaging because I did not want to excavate or press the queer into traditional spaces or cultures where research has revealed queer ghosts, but I couldn’t yet imagine a utopian vision of queerness.
In a Nigeria where being other, and loving differently is a Sword of Damocles, I wanted to look within and invoke a fantasy of queer love and possibility, out of time, but absolutely eternal.
Released: 1st October 2025.
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Born in Zambia, Libby Young lived in various parts of southern Africa before settling in Cape Town. With a background in journalism that segued into web development, she now teaches English as a second language to adults from all over the world at the University of Cape Town, where she is also working towards a doctorate that combines environmental and cultural geography with literary studies.
On ‘The Smell of Rain’
Born in Africa and having lived on the continent for most of my life, I am, however, an Irish citizen as a result of my mother’s canny decision to register my birth on the foreign register. Culturally I am a bit of a mish mash. I lived in Dublin for a while, working as a subeditor on the Irish Time’s website and my maternal family’s Catholicism and Irish heritage have certainly influenced me, with a love of leprechauns (their rebellious sense of fun), literature (not James Joyce) and whiskey (or whisky), but as my father was a divorced Protestant, I was not, and could not be ecclesiastically, fully enveloped by it, resulting in a life-long distrust of religious institutions and a sense of exclusion. Similarly, although I have lived in South Africa for longer than anywhere else, my Afrikaans is appalling due mainly to an enforced stint at an Afrikaans boarding school that permanently closed my mind to the language except its gorgeously descriptive profanities.
Non-belonging and ambivalence as a result of this background are probably my chief characteristics that persist to this day. Once I found this disturbing, now I find it (mostly) liberating. It has affected my writing in many ways: exploring different genres, different forms, and abandoning a lot of ideas. My first book was called the All African Guide to the Internet, the result of a column I wrote for the electronic Mail & Guardian just as the Internet was getting established in Africa. Bizarre though it may seem now, we used to publish in print lists of web page addresses. This was one such book. It was not a bestseller. Currently, I am attempting to write a thesis on African literature in the Anthropocene, while scribbling random lines that character’s whisper to me as I walk to work every morning through Cape Town’s company gardens. Maybe these will shape themselves into a novel one day. I like to write what I like to read so that’s usually detective or speculative/science fiction these days. Best is if I can combine the two.
The immortal words of Dr Who for time “wibbly wobbly”, describe the universe best for me. I have always struggled with dualities, manifesting in an inability to tell left from right; my world view is a messy entanglement that cannot be easily deciphered strand by strand. This is where stories come in, as they provide a way to try to relate to this mess of wibble wobbliness that overlaps and contradicts itself. A way to glimpse bits of connection, strands of light shining on something that is hidden behind something else—a way of connecting the dots in a universe that doesn’t make much sense. Writing has become a way for me to understand better how I feel about this complicated mess of a planet that is so beautiful and yet often so impenetrable. I hope you enjoy this short story.
Released 1st September 2025.
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Carmelo Rafalà, a child of Sicilian immigrants, travelled the world and somehow managed to finish his MA in Comparative English Literature at the University of South Africa. His stories have been published in various anthologies and cross genres, from science fiction to gothic horror. His fiction has been praised by such outlets as The LA Review of Books, SF Revu, and Black Nerd Problems. He is a 2024 SFFSA Nova Award winner for his story, ‘The Stars Must Wait’. A collection of his fiction will be released later in 2025. His novella, The Madness of Pursuit, was published by Guardbridge Books. He currently resides on the south coast of England.
I often don’t know why I am writing a story until my characters decide to reveal themselves to me, warts and all. Oh, I know what the beginning and the end will be, but it is only on the journey do I come to understand them, their hopes, dreams, and fears. And when I reach the story’s end, I understand those deeper things that I did not originally pick up on in the initial writing. And in that I come to understand what my subconscious has been worried about or agonizing over.
When writing this particular story, the characters battle internal and external forces—personal, political, and social. Failures and false starts are a part of most scientific endeavours. But failure was not an option for these characters. And I wanted to know why that was the case, and how that was possibly affecting me.
What I discovered was that they were living hybrid identities. (Coming from an immigrant family and having been an immigrant twice myself, it was something I found to be all too familiar.) And the structures they lived within—created institutionally and which, in turn, fed dark and nefarious ideas into their society—made sure they had to work that much harder to prove their worth.
However, amid such battles they discovered something more important than the roles they played. They discovered their personal truths. Or shall I say, rediscovered. To divulge anymore might give too much away.
But I will say this: In this story, the characters spoke their truths to me. And with that, I found that I could speak mine.
After reading this, you go and speak yours—loudly, proudly, and unapologetically.
Find Carmelo here:
Website: https://www.carmelorafala.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carmelo.rafala/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carmelorafala/
Bluesky: http://carmelorafala.bsky.social/
Released: 1st August 2025.
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Zainab Omaki is a Nigerian writer currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she was awarded the Miles Morland African Writers Scholarship. Her essays, fiction, and literary criticism have appeared in Five Points, The Los Angeles Review, Passages North, Transition Magazine, The Rumpus, and other publications. Her novel-in-progress has received support from the University of Bayreuth in Germany, the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland, and the Nebraska Arts Council. She currently serves as Assistant Nonfiction Editor at Prairie Schooner.
When I first began writing, it was to the speculative fiction and fantasy sub-genres that I was drawn. What other genres allow us to so powerfully reimagine the world — to ask why things are the way they are, what they could potentially look like, and what forces might be required to change them?
I was captivated by the myths of Northern Nigeria and broader cultural urban legends: Namijin Dare, the spirit who slipped into women’s dreams and lured them into love affairs; Madam Koskos, the eerie yet tragic ghost believed to haunt boarding schools. I wrote those stories. I lived in them. Over time, though, I found myself pulled toward realism and the urgency of portraying what’s right in front of us, unembellished. In the last year or two however, I’ve found myself returning to my first love: Fantasy. As troubling issues continue to arise across the world, I find myself yearning for alternative narratives — stories that imagine hopeful futures or, at the very least, disrupt the limiting narratives of the present.
‘The Last and Final Battle’ is one of those stories. It explores Africa’s current place in the global order, the internal and external forces sustaining the status quo, and a dramatic, catalytic event that could change everything. It’s a story I consider fun — because exploring truth doesn’t always have to be bleak — and it’s also an effort to bring mythologies from across the world into conversation for a good purpose.
I hope you enjoy it. I hope it makes you think. And most of all, I hope it inspires you to imagine new futures for the world, and for yourself.
Released 1st July 2025.
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Nerine Dorman is a South African author and editor of science fiction and fantasy currently living in Cape Town, with short fiction published in numerous anthologies. Her novel Sing down the Stars won Gold for the Sanlam Prize for Youth Literature in 2019 and The Percy Fitzpatrick Award for Children's and Youth Literature in 2021. Her YA fantasy novella Dragon Forged was a finalist in the Sanlam Prize for Youth Literature in 2017. Her short story ‘On the Other Side of the Sea’ (Omenana, 2017) was shortlisted for a 2018 Nommo award. Her novella The Firebird won a Nommo for “Best Novella” in 2019. In addition, she is a founding member of the SFF authors’ co-operative Skolion, and the curator of the South African Horrorfest Bloody Parchment event and short story competition.
Released 1st June 2025.
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When Muthi Nhlema isn't managing a non-profit or trying to understand his 12-year-old son’s obsession with anime. He is a Malawian writer best known for his adventures (and misadventures) in African speculative fiction.
His first novella, ‘Ta O'Reva’, which imagines Nelson Mandela’s return to a post-apocalyptic South Africa, won third prize in the 2015 International Freeditorial Long-Short Story Competition and was shortlisted for Best Novella at the 2017 Nommo Awards. An excerpt, ‘Legacy’, was longlisted for the 2015 Writivism Short Story Prize and was runner-up for the 2015 Dede Kamkondo Short Story Award. His short story ‘One Wit’ This Place’ was the opening piece in the speculative fiction anthology Imagine Africa 500 and was named one of the top 10 African speculative short fiction stories of 2016 by renowned writer and editor Wole Talabi. His second novella, ‘Hiraeth’, from the speculative eco-fiction anthology Mombera Rising, made the longlist for the 2024 British Science Fiction Association Awards.
In 2021, while battling writer’s block disguised as imposter syndrome, Muthi was selected for the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, becoming the fifth Malawian to join since 1967. In Iowa, he initially set out to reimagine alternate futures beyond colonial ideas of progress and modernity. When his brain hit a wall, he became inexplicably distracted by another story — one that demanded to be told and nursed him through his writer’s block.
This was that story.
‘Piss Corpse’ was selected to be the debut short story of the ZamaShort imprint series of single short stories. ZamaShort is solely focused on the amazing powerhouse that is the short story, giving each short story its own publication so that it may be read and enjoyed and savoured fully as a stand-alone publication. As per the StoryTime Publishing mandate initialised in 2007, with ZamaShort will continue to champion and add to the ever-growing canon of African literature excellence and diversity.
Find Muthi here:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/muthi-nhlema-829834156/
Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/muthi.nhlema
Released 1st May 2025.
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