Edwige Renée Dro

Edwige Renée Dro is a writer, a literary translator, and a literary activist from Côte d’Ivoire. She was identified in 2014 by the Hay Festival as a writer “with the potential and talent to define trends in the development of literature from Africa and the diaspora”.

Edwige has judged and facilitated many writing competitions such as the PEN International Short Story Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature. She has also mentored many other young creatives in the fields of creative writing and literary translation.

Her writings have been published by Bloomsbury and Harper Collins and in magazines such as Popula and This is Africa.

In February this year, she set up 1949, a library of women’s writings from Africa and the black world. The library’s mission is to unearth and shine the light upon the contributions of African and black women to the world in order to inspire present and future generations.

Kiprop Kimutai

2019 Maison Baldwin Fellow Kiprop Kimutai is a Kenyan-based writer whose fiction has appeared in Kwani? Trust, Jalada, PBQ, No Tokens, Prufrock, Kachifo, New internationalist and Acre Books.

He was a panellist for the Franschhoek Literary Festival and a speaker for the Future Nations Schools Book Fair. He has also participated in the Caine Prize, Farafina, and Kwani Trust?/Granta workshops, and was a Kweli Scholar. Kiprop has been shortlisted for the Miles Morland Scholarship and the Gerald Kraak Award, and was a Runner’s Up for the Kwani? Manuscript Project. 

As a founding member of Jalada Africa, he sought for new talent and story angles for its diverse anthologies, edited submissions and promoted published content. He is currently working on a project that he can only define as urgent.  

Twitter: @Tirobon

Maneo Refiloe Mohale

Maneo Refiloe Mohale is a South African editor, feminist writer and poet. Their work has appeared in various local and international publications, including Jalada, Prufrock, The Beautiful Project, The Mail & Guardian, spectrum.za, and others. They’ve served as a contributing editor for The New York Times and i-D, among others. They were Bitch Media’s first Global Feminism Writing Fellow in their inaugural 2016 class, where they wrote on race, media, sexuality and survivorship.

In 2017, they were Managing Editor of Platform Media, where they also served as Acting Arts Editor for the Mail and Guardian for four editions of M&G Friday and later moved on to be a Senior Media Co-ordinator for Arts and Culture at Collective Media.

They have been longlisted twice for the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Anthology Award, and their debut collection of poetry, Everything is a Deathly Flower, was published with uHlanga press in September 2019. In 2020, they were shortlisted for the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize, the youngest finalist of that year.