Writing from the margins, two authors people their novels with characters who deserve to be heard.

The perception of reality in novels is very different across global cultures. Okechukwu Nzelu’s Here Again Now is a transgenerational story of grief which is as tender and potent as love, its stark realism painting unforgettable portraits of intimacy between friends and families. As a genre, magical realism offers authors the chance to show, layered beneath disguises, the truths that haunt us. Ondjaki’s Transparent City, is focused on the intimate family networks in a crumbling Luanda apartment block – harrowing in its social realism – even as its central character Odonato’s body slowly fades, along with his faith.

Okechukwu Nzelu is a writer and lecturer. His debut novel, The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney, won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, and the Polari First Book Prize.

Ondjaki is an Angolan writer, poet, and scriptwriter whose works have been translated globally. He is one of the most prominent African novelists writing in Portuguese today.

The authors will discuss their novels with chair, Martin Colthorpe, Programmer at the International Literature Festival Dublin

‘Here Again Now is a compelling, enchanting novel of love, grief, and healing. Written in sumptuous prose, and with formal flair, it is heart-breaking, redeeming, and utterly mesmerising.’ Seán Hewitt

‘Ondjaki’s prose shifts through a kaleidoscope of registers, from the poetic to the political, the erotic to the absurd’ – Times Literary Supplement

Presented in association with Dublin UNESCO City of Literature with kind support by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht,  Sport and Media.