Ellah Wakatama Allfrey

Ellah Wakatama
OBE, Hon. FRSL
Ellah Wakatama (photo by Julian Knox)
Born
Ellah Wakatama

(1966-09-16) 16 September 1966 (age 58)
Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe)
NationalityZimbabwean and British
Other namesEllah Allfrey
Shava, Musiyamwa (Address: vaChihera)
EducationArundel School; Goshen College; Rutgers University
Occupation(s)Literary editor and publisher
Known forPublishing

Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL (born 16 September 1966),[1] is the Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books,[2] a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University, and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing.[3] She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press.[4] A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was the Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine,[5][6] she was the senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and an assistant editor at Penguin. She is the series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39[7] (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction (Dundurn/Cassava Republic).

Her journalism has appeared in the Telegraph, Guardian and Observer newspapers as well as in the Spectator and The Griffith Review magazines. She is also a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.[3] She has also been a regular contributor to the book pages of NPR. Her broadcasting includes reviews for NPR’s All Things Considered and BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review. She sat on the selection panel for the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship for seven years and served as a literature selector for the Rolex 2014-15 Mentor & Protégée Initiative, as well as serving as chair of the Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship Selection panel for three years. She sits on the advisory board for Art for Amnesty and the Editorial Advisory Panel of The Johannesburg Review of Books and the Lagos Review of Books. In 2011, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the publishing industry and in 2019, she was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[8]

  1. ^ Editorial Team (14 August 2019), "2019: Top 10 Literary Curators and Editors from Africa Right Now" Archived 11 December 2019 at the Wayback Machine, Witsprouts.
  2. ^ Wood, Heloise (13 June 2019). "Ellah Wakatama Allfrey joins Canongate as editor-at-large | The Bookseller". www.thebookseller.com. Archived from the original on 29 July 2019. Retrieved 29 July 2019.
  3. ^ a b "Our New Chairperson". The Caine Prize for African Writing. 2 April 2019. Archived from the original on 8 April 2019. Retrieved 29 July 2019.
  4. ^ Edoro, Ainehi (4 June 2018). "There's a New Publisher in Town! | Indigo Press Promises Bold Ideas and Beautifully-crafted Stories". Brittle Paper. Archived from the original on 7 September 2018. Retrieved 29 July 2019.
  5. ^ Farrington, Joshua (3 May 2013). "Allfrey to leave Granta | The Bookseller". www.thebookseller.com. Archived from the original on 26 August 2024. Retrieved 29 July 2019.
  6. ^ Page, Benedicte (20 July 2009). "Allfrey joins Granta Magazine | The Bookseller". www.thebookseller.com. Archived from the original on 29 July 2019. Retrieved 29 July 2019.
  7. ^ Bloomsbury.com. "Africa39". Bloomsbury Publishing. Archived from the original on 19 September 2021. Retrieved 29 July 2019.
  8. ^ "Ellah Wakatama Allfrey". The Royal Society of Literature | RSL Fellows. September 2023. Archived from the original on 26 August 2024. Retrieved 7 April 2023.