Author: Karina

We are delighted to announce that Captive: New Short Fiction from Africa, edited by Helen Moffett and Rachel Zadok, is now available in SA from Karavan Press. First published in the US by Catalyst Press, the new Short Story Day Africa anthology is a literary feast of note.

“What a wonderful addition to the literary landscape, what a delectable survey of the breadth, and indeed depth, of the African literary imaginary.”
Idza Luhumyo, 2022 Caine Prize Winner

Contributors

Salma Yusuf | Sola Njoku | Aba Abison | Kabubu Mutua | Emily Perdigo | Doreen Anyango | Khumbo Mahone | Moso Sematlane | N. A. Dawn | Josephine Sokan | Zanta Nkumane

From Short Story Day Africa, eleven writers from Africa and the African diaspora explore the identities that connect us, the obsessions that bewitch us, and the self-delusions that drive us apart.
Passion and apathy, creation and destruction, honesty and deception – the blurred lines between these forces are fundamental to the human condition. In three parts, the writers investigate these liminal spaces and rail against the boxes in which others seek to confine them, as writers, as Africans, and as humans.
Journey from the fantastical Heaven’s Mouth where time stands still, to a London bus where a neurodiverse woman steals love to the songs of Tom Jones … flip the page to Ghana to examine a fertility fetish, or a post-apocalyptic Lesotho where sentient AI uses our emotions against us … visit the deceptively beautiful islands off the Tanzanian coast, where the ocean is always hungry, and women pay the price. Captive is a riot of imagination, a collision of worlds, and a testament to the shape-shifting nature of the soul.

“The calibre of stories is unsurprising given the authors involved, and the scholarly/editorial skills of editors Helen Moffett and Rachel Zadok … This anthology offers Afrocentric fiction, stories beautifully canvassed and etched out with the finest strokes that sometimes coat stories within stories.”
Eugene M. Bacon, Locus Magazine

Introduction

The thirty-three stories contained in this collection are the result of a mentorship curriculum we, with our usual sense of the ridiculous, titled the SSDA Inkubator. The idea for a story incubator was seeded seven years ago in another Short Story Day Africa (SSDA) initiative, a series of bi-weekly flash fiction events held on social media. The popularity of these events highlighted a need within the African writing community for spaces where writers could develop work towards publication. Few such spaces exist on the continent. Of the twenty-two top-ranked universities in Africa for creative writing courses, fifteen are in South Africa (with the top eleven on the list also in South Africa), three are in Nigeria, two are in Ghana, and Mozambique and Zimbabwe each have one. This means that African writers either need to go abroad to further their creative writing ambitions, or create spaces for themselves.
The SSDA Inkubator is our endeavour to create such a space, and the twelve writers we selected for the pilot project, run in conjunction with Laxfield Literary Associates and supported by a grant from the British Council, were chosen because their voices were original and diverse, and the messages contained within their submissions powerful enough to one day cause ripples in the zeitgeist. The challenge for the writers when submitting their proposals was that they only had a maximum of one thousand words of prose to convince us they had the raw talent to deliver.
SSDA has spent years honing our mission to subvert, reimagine and reclaim the literary landscape for writers from Africa. We have done this by ensuring that we develop and publish a diverse range of voices, looking beyond the expected and polished to the raw, sometimes unhoned, edge that makes a writer’s voice sing. The SSDA Inkubator is by far our most successful development programme in this regard. We found talented writers from the African continent and diaspora and took them on a journey from story seed to final publication, exposing them, via a series of workshops, to the wisdom, techniques and craft of six brilliant African writers and editors, and one British literary agent with her eyes focused on the continent’s literary talent pool.
Captive is the result. Divided into three themed parts chosen by the writers as a community, these stories explore some of our most pressing concerns: love, migration, ambition, motherhood, ageing, culture, folklore, AI, mental health, fairytales and possible futures …
These are more than stories. In their words these eleven Inkubator Fellows have built bridges across imagined borders, knotted stitches to mend divisions, and written a balm for our fractured global society. We hope you read them with delight, and, after turning the final page, approach your fellows with greater empathy.
Rachel Zadok
Managing Editor, Short Story Day Africa

ISBN: 978-1-7764726-4-2

Publication date: May 2025