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Ayesha Harruna Attah in conversation with Zoë Gadegbeku at the BPL

February 26, 2019 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Free

Aminah lives an idyllic life until she is brutally separated from her home and forced on a journey that turns her from a daydreamer into a resilient woman. Wurche, the willful daughter of a chief, is desperate to play an important role in her father’s court. These two women’s lives converge as infighting among Wurche’s people threatens the region, during the height of the slave trade at the end of the 19th century. Set in pre-colonial Ghana, The Hundred Wells of Salaga is a story of courage, forgiveness, love and freedom. It offers a view of internal slavery in Africa and how the scramble for Africa affected the lives of everyday people.

Born to two Ghanaian journalists, AYESHA HARRUNA ATTAH grew up in Accra and was educated at Columbia University and NYU. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Asymptote Magazine, and the Caine Prize Writers’ 2010 Anthology. Her debut novel, Harmattan Rain, (Per Ankh Publishers) was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2010. Her second novel, Saturday’s Shadows, was published in English (World Editions) and Dutch (De Geus) in 2015.  Ayesha was awarded the 2016 Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship for non-fiction and she currently lives in Senegal. Ayesha will also be featured in the forthcoming anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

Zoë Gadegbeku is a Ghanaian writer living in Boston. Her work has appeared in Afreada, Brittle Paper, Saraba Magazine, Blackbird, Slice Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a fellow in the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice as an undergraduate at Georgetown University, and a participant in the 2017 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop at the University of the West Indies-Cave Hill, Barbados. She received her MFA in Fiction from Emerson College, where she worked in communications and taught first-year writing.

Details

Date:
February 26, 2019
Time:
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Cost:
Free
Event Category:
Event Tags:
,
Website:
https://bpl.bibliocommons.com/events/5c21103c664f462a009ad73e

Organizer

Boston Public Library
Phone:
6175365400
Email:
ask@bpl.org
Website:
www.bpl.org

Venue

Commonwealth Salon, Boston Public Library, Central Library in Copley Square
700 Boylston St
Boston, MA 02116 United States
+ Google Map
Phone:
617-536-5400
Website:
http://www.bpl.org/

Did You Know?

Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.