Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, OBE, Hon, FRSL, is Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University and Chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, she was senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and assistant editor at Penguin. She is series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction. Her journalism has appeared in the Telegraph, Guardian and Observer newspapers and in Spectator and The Griffith Review magazines, and she is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa. She has also been a regular contributor to the books pages of NPR. Her broadcasting includes reviews for NPR’s All Things Considered and BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review. She sat on the selection panel for the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship for seven years and served as a literature selector for the Rolex 2014–15 Mentor & Protégée Initiative, as well as serving as chair of the Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship Selection panel for three years. She sits on the Advisory board for Art for Amnesty and the Editorial Advisory Panel of the Johannesburg Review of Books and the Lagos Review of Books. In 2011 she was awarded an OBE for services to the publishing industry and was made and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019.
Life
Born in Harare, Zimbabwe, on 16 September 1966 to Zimbabwean novelist, journalist and publisher Pius Wakatama and entrepreneur and Christian women's rights activist Winnie Wakatama, Ellah Wakatama Allfrey spent her formative years between Harare and Midwest USA while her father studied at the University of Iowa. She returned to Zimbabwe at the age of 10, attending Arundel School. Her return to America was prompted by her college education, which began at Goshen College, where she received a BA in Journalism, ending at Rutgers University where she earned an MA from the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies. She is the sister of writer and natural-birth campaigner Mavhu Farai Wakatama Hargrove and of the late Nhamu Wakatama and Richard Wakatama. She now resides in London, UK, working as Editor-at-Large Canongate Books, Research Fellow, The University of Manchester and Chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing.
African Writers Trust Literary Feast, Uganda, May 2012.
Literary week Nairobi, judge.
Judge for Kwani? Manuscript Project – literary prize for unpublished fiction by African writers.
"The Trans-Atlantic, the Diaspora, and Africa" participant. – conference hosted by Oxford University Research Centre for the Humanities, to discuss the newest theoretical scholarship emerging from the interdisciplinary fields of USA-derived Diaspora Studies and British-derived Trans-Atlantic Studies, and how these fields have diverged and converged in relation to the idea of Africa.
Patron of Etisalat Prize for Literature – pan-African prize celebrating first-time African writers of published books of fiction.
