As part of a special conversation held by the Other's Friends team and guest editor Logan February, We present; There is Hope, a podcast conversation between Azeenarh Mohammed, Arit Okpo and Olumide Makanjuola about the present and future of LGBT people on the continent. 

Nnamdi Ehirim is a Nigerian writer and essayist, best known for his challenging debut novel 'Prince Of Monkeys', published by Counterpoint Press. A serial collaborator, Mino has worked extensively with literary magazine, Arts and Africa and co-founded the Ape's Collective, a literary collective seeking to challenge long held conventions about the craft in Africa. 

Mino and I discuss his favorite short fiction, the place of collaboration in growing the African literary industry and having to choose between short fiction and full length work. 

Ope Adedeji was recently nominated for the 2020 Ellies for her prize winning story 'After The Birds' published by Mc Sweeneys as a collection of stories from the 2018 Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop, personally selected by Chimamanda Adichie. 

She has worked as an editor for Ouida Books and is a Short Story Day Africa Fellow. We discuss her work with Arts and Africa, her identity as a writer winning prizes but still considered as emerging and how writing has changed her life. 

Enjoy. 

Theme music by Dan Frano. 

TJ Benson is a speculative fiction writer living in Abuja. His debut short story collection, 'We Won't Fade Into Darkness' was published by Paressia Books and he is publishing his sophomore novel, the Mad House under Masobe Books. He is a teacher of fiction and a runner up for the 2017 Short Story Day Africa Prize and contributor to its Migrations Anthology. 

On this episode of the podcast we talk to development specialist and fiction and non-fiction writer Alithnayn Abdulkareem. As a Muslim woman of colour, Alithayn straddles many intersections of race, gender and religion and she explores those intersections in her fiction. 

Her work has been published in Wasafiri, The Selves Anthology, and the Short Story Day Africa ID Anthology. We talk about the limits of non-fiction, female writers she admires and the future of literature in Nigeria. 

The idea behind the The Other Friends Podcast is pretty straight forward. Casual conversation between friends about the writing life. Our focus is on young writers, still in the process of figuring themselves out and the place they want to occupy in the world. 

But most importantly, we want to create a time capsule of what we feel about everything literature related today, so we can look back and see how much we've evolved. 

Toye Sokunbi and Esther Edoro are two of the brightest young writers creating in the Nigerian literary space, I sit with them to discuss short literature and the lit they personally love