Anjan Sundaram and Erroll McDonald Chaired by Alexandra Pringle

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Journalist Anjan Sundaram and publisher Errol McDonald look at who is publishing African and Caribbean writers in the UK and US and discuss what can be done to make these voices better heard and more widely known.

Sundaram is author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo, and Breakup: A Reporter’s Marriage amid a Central African War (out in May). He has reported from Central Africa for many national newspapers, including The Guardian, Telegraph and New York Times. He is a winner of the Frontline Club Award and a Reuters prize.

McDonald is a vice-president and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf.  In his decades-long career in the industry, he has published, among other writers, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Wole Soyinka, Sandra Cisneros, Ngugi wa Thiongo, John Edgar Wideman, Harold Bloom, Fran Lebowitz, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Lucy Sante, Margo Jefferson, Richard Posner, Nina Simone and Richard Pryor.  A former PEN America trustee, he is chair of the board of directors of The Center for Fiction and a board member of The Brooklyn Rail.  He is a professor at Columbia and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Discusssions are chaired by Alexandra Pringle, former editor in chief and now executive publisher at Bloomsbury Publishing. Pringle was also a founder of Virago Press, which champions women writers and aims to bring their voice to the widest readership around the world.

The event will also launch by the festival, The Nwelue Trust and Abibiman Publishing of the new £5,000 Oxford Literary Festival Prize for a New Manuscript for a book-length unpublished work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world.

This event is part of the festival’s programme of African literature and culture.