The New Wave

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's talk "The Danger of a Single Story" became one of the most shared statements ever made about how we represent other people. Ben Okri took a different route to acclaim, winning the Booker Prize with The Famished Road, a novel built on the rhythms of Yoruba spirit-child tales.

Adichie proved African fiction could be funny, politically sharp, and intimate all at once. Her core idea: a single story, repeated often enough, hardens into a stereotype. The West had told one story about Africa — poverty, war, helplessness — and shrunk a whole continent down to it. She gave readers a name for the harm.