Africa World Lectures

A high-level platform for imagining, assessing, and keeping pace with the ideas, realities, and futures of Africa by the continent’s finest minds. The lectures are established to bring greater visibility, from the perspective of Africa to Princeton’s support of knowledge production about Africa. The lectures will take place in October.

Abdulrazak Gurnah Lecture

Abdulrazak Gurnah posed in a grey suit.

 

Presenting the second Africa World Lectures, Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. Mr. Gurnah is known for his novels about the effects of colonialism and displacement in the world. 

In 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism”. 

He is the first Black writer to receive the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993, and the first African writer since Nadine Gordimer in 1991.

His novels include Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Paradise (1994), Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), Desertion (2005), The Last Gift (2011), Gravel Heart (2017) and Afterlives (2020).

Short stories: Cages (1984), Bossy (1994), Escort (1996), The Photograph of the Prince (2012), My Mother Lived on a Farm in Africa (2006), The Arriver’s Tale (2016), and The Stateless Person’s Tale (2019).

Mr. Gurnah will be giving a lecture at Princeton University on October 30th, 2024.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Oct 25, 2023, 4:30 pm

Presenting the Inaugural Africa World Lectures, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1977. She grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where her father was a professor, and her mother was the first female registrar.

She studied medicine for a year at Nsukka and then left for the US at the age of 19 to continue her education…

10/25 Location: Richardson Auditorium        Book Ticket      Full Video EVENT     Event Pictures      Her thoughts about her fiction writing