The Sea Has Drowned The Fish: Fiction, Fact and Folktale from Writers Project of Ghana

Ayesha Harruna Attah published her debut novel, Harmattan Rain (Per Ankh Publishers), in 2009. It was nominated for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Saturday's Shadows (World Editions) was shortlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013. Her forthcoming novel, The Hundred Wells of Salaga (Cassava Republic Press,) will be released in May 2018.

Ayesha was born in Accra and educated at Mount Holyoke College, Columbia University, and NYU. A 2015 Africa Centre Artists in Residency Award Laureate and Sacatar Fellow, she won the 2016 Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship for non-fiction. She currently lives in Senegal and loves making ice-cream and staring at the ocean.

I am Chuma Nwokolo, and I tell stories.

I was born in Jos, in 1963, although I have no full recollection of the event. I graduated from the University of Nigeria Nsukka in 1983 and was called to the bar in 1984. I was managing partner of the C&G Chambers in Lagos and writer-in-residence at The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. I founded the literary magazine African Writing with my old friend, Afam Akeh. My first novels, The Extortionist (1983) and Dangerous Inheritance (1988), were published by Macmillan in the Pacesetter Novels. My stories have found foster homes in the London Review of Books, La Internazionale, AGNI, MTLS, Arzenal, and Sentinel, among places.

I am really a short story writer, although I am not above stitching tales together into more garrulous novels. Thus, African Tales at Jailpoint (1999), One More Tale for the Road (2003), and – truth be told – Diaries of a Dead African (2003). My more honest anthologies consist of The Ghost of Sani Abacha (2012), How to Spell Naija in 100 Short Stories Volumes 1 (2013), and 2 (2016).

I am guilty of poetry, some of which have been collected in Memories of Stone (2006) and The Final Testament of a Minor God (2014), but without question, the most difficult, sustained, and in a sense satisfying thing I have ever done is my imminent novel, The Extinction of Menai.

Great stories can change us… if we ever get around to reading them. Yet, there is another type of writing that can change the world, whether they are widely read or not: Law. Literature rolls up into a scroll; the law rolls up into a baton for the stubborn, and often, that makes all the difference. After the gentler persuasions of literature, society is eventually renewed by the agency of transformative law, think the abolition of slavery, of Apartheid.

Kofi Akpabli is a Ghanaian academic, journalist, publisher, tourism consultant and cultural activist. He is a two-time winner of the CNN Multichoice African Journalist for Arts and Culture Awards. His latest work ‘Made in Nima’ has been featured in the new Commonwealth Anthology which was published in May 2016 Safe House: Explorations into Creative Non-Fiction.

Akpabli has four books to his credit and currently works as a lecturer at Central University College in Ghana. He is a founding member of Ghana Cultural Forum and has participated in Xplore FrankfurtRheinemann 2012, Tallberg Forum, Sweden 2011, Berlin Art Festival 2010 and the Düsseldorf Art Preview 2010.

Manu Herbstein (b. 1936 near Cape Town, South Africa) holds dual South African and Ghanaian citizenship. In the 1960s he worked as a civil and structural engineer in England, Nigeria, Ghana, India, Ghana again, Zambia and Scotland. He returned to Ghana in 1970 and has lived there since. He began writing seriously as he approached retirement. His first novel, Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book. It has been published in South Africa and India and a new African edition was launched in Accra, Ghana in 2010. A new edition, published in 2016, is available from Amazon. A companion web-site, www.ama.africatoday.com, is a rich repository of primary and secondary texts and images related to the novel. Brave Music of a Distant Drum, published by Red Deer Press in Canada and the U.S. in 2011, and in an updated edition in 2016, is a sequel aimed at younger readers. Akosua and Osman won one of three 2011 Burt Awards for African Literature in Ghana. A new edition became available from Amazon in 2017. Ramseyer's Ghost is a dystopian/utopian political thriller set in Ghana in 2050. The author turned down an offer from an independent publisher in the U.S., choosing to self-publish with CreateSpace. President Michelle or Ten Days which Shook the World is a story every U.S. citizen should read, particularly after the election of Donald Trump as President. Manu's latest novel, The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti's Eye, received the U.S.-based African Literature Association's 2016 Book of the Year Award for Creative Writing, awarded for "an outstanding book of African literature, whether novel, non-fiction prose, play, or poetry collection, published in the preceding calendar year by an African writer."

Martin Egblewogbe was born in Ghana in 1975. He has a Ph.D in Physics and works at the University of Ghana, Legon where he is a lecturer in the Department of Physics. He enjoys writing short stories and poetry in his spare time and has contributed to several anthologies.

He also currently hosts the radio show “Writers Project” on CitiFM in Accra, Ghana.

Martin currently lives with his wife and two children in Accra. Martin Egblewogbe’s stories and poetry have appeared in newspapers, anthologies, and several works of his are available online. A number of his stories have won awards and commendations.

Originally self-published as 'Mr Happy and the Hammer of God', Martin’s collection of short stories was re-issued by Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd. in 2012 as “Mr Happy and the Hammer of God and Other Stories”. In 2010, Martin Egblewogbe and Laban Carrick Hill co-edited the anthology of poetry, “Look Where You Have Gone To Sit” (Woeli, 2010). His second collection of short stories, 'The Waiting' was released in 2020.

Mary Ashun is Principal of Ghana International School in Cantonments, Accra. Mary holds a BSc from Univ. of East London (UK), a B.Ed. from Univ. of Toronto and a Ph.D from SUNY Buffalo, NY. Prior to taking up this current role, she was Principal of Philopateer Christian College in Toronto, Canada and a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Redeemer University in Canada. Mary has over 20 years of experience in International Education as a teacher, administrator and researcher.

Mary enjoys writing and most recently adapted the Disney musical, The Prince of Egypt for the stage. Ghana International School students made her proud by staging it at the National Theatre to wide acclaim. Her novel Tuesday's Child was a quarterfinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. She has published science fiction for children as well as picture books. Her short story African Connection joins those of Ama Ata Aidoo and Ivor Agyeman Duah, edited by the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka in the upcoming anthology The Gods Who Bring Us Gifts. Mary writes for children (e.g. Stubborn Kwame, The Adventures of Kobby Badu Smith), Young Adults (Serwa Akoto’s Diary) and Adults (eg. Tuesday’s Child, Mistress Of The Game). Mary is constantly exploring various art forms and is in the process of releasing her first song working with Vimsion Studios in Accra.

Mary is a Klingenstein Fellow of Teachers College, Columbia University in New York. Mary and her husband Joseph have three sons: Abeyku 25, Kwamena 19, and Jojo 16.

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is a feminist activist, writer and blogger. She is the co-founder of Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, an award-winning blog that focuses on African women, sex and sexualities, and she writes frequently for The Guardian, Open Democracy, and elsewhere. She works with the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) as director of communications and tactics. She lives in Accra, Ghana.