The Enemy of the State and Other Stories

Adolika Nenah Sowah is an audiovisual content producer, writer and an artist with a mind that is constantly creating cross-cultural associations of sound and images to bring freshness to familiar narratives. The Contest and Other Spiderman Tales, the first of her exploration in this genre, is a product of the curiosity of her thinking. With a focus on reinterpretation and pictorial representation of the character of Kweku Ananse, the illustrations represent her personal rediscovery of Ananse the spider man, hero and villain of Ghanaian folktales. As a person with Ghanaian and Russian parentage, her exposure to the deceptive simplicity of depicting movement in two-dimensional spaces and a long-standing interest in Southern African rock art have resulted in the highly evocative art she expresses beyond the narration to include the illustrations in The Contest and Other Spiderman Tales. From her wild childhood, full of the explorations into music making, ballet dancing, she spent a great deal of time passively observing life and reconstructing figures, drawing, painting, and daydreaming.

With over two decades of experience as a producer, writer, and director, Adolika Nenah Sowah brings her sharp power of observation, and satiric humour into the world of fiction writing.
The Enemy of the State and Other Stories is the first short story collection by the author and illustrator of The Contest and Other Spiderman Tales, which received the Children’s Story Book 2nd prize at the Ghana Associations of Writer’s Literary Awards 2021.
Adolika Nenah Sowah lives with her family in Accra and blogs at adolika.com

Adolika Nenah loves inventing stories to make her daughter laugh. She makes a sinfully delicious chocolate cake.