The covers fly open tomorrow! Berlin’s International Literature Festival kicks off with a reading by author Taiye Selasi.
Born in London to a Ghanaian father and Nigerian-Scottish mother, educated in Yale and Oxford, the photographer-model-author Selasi lives in Rome and New York – a true “Afropolitan” (a term she coined herself). Weeks after her debut Ghana Must Go was released in over a dozen languages, Taiye Selasi was on the Granta shortlist of “Best Young British Novelists”. She opens this year’s ILB with her speech “African Literature Does Not Exist” (Sep 4, 20:30).
Describe yourself in three words starting with the same letter…
Peripatetic, passionate, playful.
Your favourite character?
I love any fearless female hero of any given fantasy, likely because in my wildest imagination, I envision myself as the same.
Your recurring literary nightmare?
Waking up one maudlin morning with no more stories to tell.
A book do you wish you had written?
The God of Small Things.
Your first memory of writing…
I cannot remember ever having not written. I suppose the birth of memory, for me, must be coterminous with the birth of a love of storytelling.
If I weren’t a writer I’d be…
Lost. Utterly lost.
