InterKontinental

Mohamedou Ould Slahi Houbeini (Arabic: محمدو ولد الصلاحي) was born in 1970 in Rosso, Mauritania, as the son of a camel herder. At the age of 18, he moved to Germany on a scholarship to study Electrical Engineering. He travelled to Afghanistan for training in an Al-Qaida camp, but disavowed the organisation two months later and states not to have any ties ever since. In the wake of 11 September, he has been interrogated and accused time and again. In 2001 he was kidnapped by the US secret service. During his 15 years of incarceration in Guantánamo Bay detention center, without ever being charged, he was tortured and mistreated. Nowadays, US authorities have ruled out his involvement in any terrorist attacks. Proof to the contrary has never been found.

While imprisoned, Slahi Houbeini wrote a total of four books, which have in part been confiscated. His memoir, originally published as Guantánamo Diary (Canongate, 2015) became an international bestseller and has been adapted for the screen as The Mauritanian (2021) with Tahar Rahim and Jodie Foster in leading roles. The movie is bewildering, but simultaneously a testament to the resilience of a man confined under the most atrocious conditions, who has nonetheless remained in high spirits.

Slahi Houbeini’s debut novel The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga (Ohio University Press, 2021) will be translated into German and published by InterKontinental Verlag this August. This timeless novel is a poetic and subtle account of a Bedouin family’s fight for survival in the face of a changing world, and addresses questions of global responsibility.

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

Lauri Kubuitsile is a novelist and author of more than 30 books. She has been awarded several awards such as The Golden Baobab Prize for African children’s writing, the winner of the Botswana Ministry of Youth, Sport and Culture’s Botswerere Prize for Creative Writing, and was a finalist for the 2011 Caine Prize. Her books are prescribed reading in schools in Botswana and South Africa.

Her historical novel, The Scattering (Penguin 2016), won Best International Fiction Book 2017 at the Sharjah International Book and was recommended by the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction (UK) 2017. The North American rights have been bought by Waveland Press (USA). Her second historical novel But Deliver Us from Evil was published by Penguin in May 2019. It was long-listed for the 2020 NOMMO award. In May 2020, her legal thriller/romance, Revelations, was published by Love Africa Press.

She lives happily in a village in Botswana with her daughter, grandson, three dogs and two cats.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan novelist and short story writer. She has a PhD from Lancaster University. Her first novel, Kintu (Oneworld, 2018), won the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013 and was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize in 2014. She was awarded the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for 'Let's Tell This Story Properly', which featured in her first collection, Manchester Happened (Oneworld, 2019). She was awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction 2018. In 2020, she was selected as one of 100 Most Influential Africans of 2020 by New African magazine. Her second novel The First Woman (Oneworld, 2020) was selected as book of the year by the Sunday Times, Observer, Daily Mail, BBC Culture and the Irish Independent and awarded the Jhalak Prize 2021. She lives in Manchester, and lectures in Creative Writing at various universities in the UK .