Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 02 May
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Endorsed by the likes of Roxane Gay, Colson Whitehead and George Saunders – and by the New York Times bestseller list – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a star on the rise.
The 27-year-old African American author made his debut last year with Friday Black, a mind-bending and provocative collection of short stories about consumerism, race, technology and the violence of the modern world. By turns absurdly surreal and brutally recognisable, and often humming with dark humour, the book’s stories coincide with many of our moment’s most urgent issues; Adjei-Brenyah describes them as concerned with ‘problems inherent to the project of America’.
Appearing for the first time in Melbourne for our Mayhem series, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah will speak with Areej Nur about his six years of writing, workshopping and rewriting Friday Black – and what comes next.
Neighbourhood Books will be our bookseller for this event.
Featuring
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is from Spring Valley, New York, and graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. He was the 2016-2017 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Fiction at Colgate University. His bestselling debut is Friday Black, and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including Guernica, Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, Printer’s Row, Gravel, and the Breakwater Review, where he was selected by ZZ Packer as the winner of the 2nd Annual Breakwater Review Fiction Contest.
According to the New York Times, Friday Black is 'a powerful and important and strange and beautiful collection of stories meant to be read right now ... an unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary American voice ... Adjei-Brenyah, with his own “maroon of life,” is here to signal a warning, or perhaps just to say this is what it feels like, in stories that move and breathe and explode on the page.'
Areej Nur
Areej Nur is a radio producer, presenter and educator. She is also co-founder of the podcast network Broadwave. Most of Areej’s work seeks to support women of colour, particularly black women, to be at the forefront of conversations about media, arts, race and feminism in Australia.