Ellah Wakatama Allfrey


Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, OBE, Hon. FRSL, is the Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University, and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. 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, 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 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.
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. 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 for services to the publishing industry and in 2019, she was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Biography

Born in Salisbury, Rhodesia, on 16 September 1966 to Zimbabwean novelist, journalist and publisher Pius Wakatama and entrepreneur and Christian women's rights activist Winnie Wakatama, Ellah Wakatama spent her formative years between Salisbury and the midwestern USA while her father studied at the University of Iowa. She returned to Rhodesia at the age of 10, attending Arundel School. Her return to America was prompted by her college education, which began at Goshen College, where she received a BA in Journalism, ending at Rutgers University, where she earned an MA from the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies.
She now resides in London, UK, working as Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, and Chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing.
She is the sister of writer and natural-birth campaigner Mavhu Farai Wakatama Hargrove and of the late Nhamu Wakatama and Richard Wakatama. Wakatama married fellow Goshen College graduate Richard Allfrey, with whom she has a daughter.

Awards

A Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, Allfrey was awarded an OBE in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to the publishing industry.
In 2019, she was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
She was named Brittle Papers "African Literary Person of the Year 2019". an award recognizing individuals who work behind the scenes to hold up the African literary establishment.

Selected articles and essays

  • Review of Call It Dog by Marli Roode
  • "The great Chinua Achebe was the man who gave Africa a voice"
  • "All Hail the African Renaissance"
  • "The cultural battle gave us books and music of genius"
  • "Writers need new ways of talking about Africa's past and present"
  • "Longchase"

Podcasts/video

Opinion

  • "The 10 best contemporary African books". The Observer, 26 August 2012.
  • Quoted by Parselo Kantai, Nairobi, in, The Africa Report, 8 February 2012.
  • "No Violet: From the African Booker to the Booker longlist"

Interviews

Collaborations