Wednesday, 02. April 2014, 18:30 – 20:00 h
At the University of Zurich, Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zurich, KOL-G-201
As a category, the term "African literature" is as meaningless as any other attempt to ascribe and delimit culture regionally. The insistence on these outdated categories, especially in the case of Africa, points to a gross neglect of the complexity of the African continent and not least the creativity of the works that constitute African literature as a subject.
Taiye Selasi was born in London in 1979 and grew up in Brooklyn, Massachussetts. She studied American Studies at Yale before returning to England to complete a Masters in International Relations at Oxford. She is a writer and photographer and describes herself as Afropolitan, a term she herself created to describe a new generation of global citizens with African roots. A collection of short stories entitled "The Sex Lives of African Girls" appeared in the literary magazine Granta in 2011. Her debut novel "Ghana Must Go" was published in 2013 and received worldwide attention. Today she lives and works in Rome and New York.