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For all the critical acclaim his novels have received—and deserve—I suspect that more readers know Teju Cole through his writing on the Internet than have read Open City or Every…

I invited Sofia Samatar to come to UT’s “Symposium for African Writers” but I never asked her if she thought of herself as an African writer. In this interview, she…

Before Tope Folarin won the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing, it might not have been completely clear that he was an African writer. His parents are Nigerian, of course,…

It’s hard to talk about a writer like Miral al-Tahawy without falling into stale clichés. To “read” an Arab writer through how she does or does not cover, to “discover”…

When I interviewed Laila Lalami a few weeks ago, we talked quite a lot about critics and readers. This was probably my fault. Her new novel, The Moor’s Account, is…

In the first interview for this series, the novelist Maaza Mengiste spoke with me from New York City, on the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11. We discussed her acclaimed first novel, Beneath…

Genevieve Kaplan