Nii Ayikwei Parkes and Peace Adzo Medie chaired Suzi Feay

Poet, publisher and novelist Nii Ayikwei Parkes and novelist Peace Adzo Medie talk about their new works, Azúcar and Nightbloom.

Parkes’s Azúcar (sugar) is a magic realist story set on a fictional Caribbean island written in a style that is part novel and part poetry. It asks what price we have to pay to have a place called home. It follows Ghanaian-born, Caribbean-raised musician Yunior and Caribbean-American college student Emelina Santos, heiress of the Soñada dynasty, who first meet at a fiesta. Over the years they travel divergent journeys through history, music, myth and heartbreak. These journeys raise the question of what it means to belong to a place or to another person. Parkes is a British-Ghanaian writer who has won critical acclaim as a poet, novelist, broadcaster and children’s author. His novel, Tail of the Blue, was praised internationally and won France’s two main prizes for translated fiction, Prix Baudelaire and Prix Laure Bataillon. His poetry collection, The Geez, was shortlisted for the Walcott Prize and was a Poetry Book Society 2020 recommendation. He founded flipped eye publishing, which focuses on voices from the margins of British society, is the literature programmer for Brighton Festival and serves on the boards of World Literature Today and the AKO Caine Prize.

Nightbloom is Adzo Medie’s second novel. It takes a look at family, class and discrimination in Ghana and the US. Cousins Selasi and Akorfa are born on the same day in 1985 and grow up in a small Ghanaian town. Selasi starts to construct a wall around herself as they enter their teens and Akorfa soon no longer recognises her friend. Their paths cross again many years later when Akorfa is a successful woman working in international development in the US and Selasi is running a successful restaurant in Accra. One of Selasi’s staff is threatened by a corrupt minister and Selasi and Akorfa must overcome their differences and face the truth of what happened years ago. Medie’s first novel, His Only Wife, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, and a Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020. She has held an Oxford-Princeton global leaders fellowship and is a lecturer in gender and politics at Bristol University.

Discussions are chaired by journalist and reviewer for the FT Suzi Feay.