AfricanBookMarket

AfricanBookMarket is the African literary catalogue: the continent’s writers and the books they made, with a magazine built around it. Every book is chosen and filed by hand, under its people and tradition, its region, its form and the language it was first written in.

The catalogue runs across the continent (West, East, Central, Southern and North Africa and the Horn) and across time, beginning with the griots’ epics and the Timbuktu and Ge’ez manuscripts and reaching the new titles of the current season. It concentrates on African writers writing from and about their own peoples, including books first written in African languages and in Arabic, French and Portuguese. Writers of the diaspora will be catalogued in a later section of their own.

Each tradition opens with its people, where they live, how they tell stories and what lore they keep, and the writers and books from inside that tradition follow. The order is deliberate, and it is where the site’s line comes from.

The magazine leads with Mythology & Origins, which follows an old story or a manuscript tradition forward to the novelists using it today.

Writers by Structure files African writers by the architecture their books are built in. The architectures come from GriotsWell, where each people’s stories, mythology and history make up a GriotsWell World Story World; nine Architectures of Story have been mapped from them so far: Linear, Cyclical, Spiral, Balance-Seeking, Web / Network, Non-Conflict, Geographic, Multi-Trial and Negotiation / Reciprocal.

The GriotsWell Universe

AfricanBookMarket belongs to the GriotsWell Universe (Tracing the origins of story) alongside two sister sites, each with its own subject:

• GriotsWell, Our world and the worlds of stories: the GriotsWell World Story Worlds and Classic Story Worlds, and the World Story Plot Architectures.
• DarkerSpace, Visions of past and future from the deeper parts of space: World Mythology, the cosmological record, and world science fiction.
• AfricanBookMarket, We stand on the shoulders of the past to see into the future: African writers, their peoples and their lore.

The Academy

The Academy of the GriotsWell Universe: one Academy for GriotsWell, DarkerSpace and AfricanBookMarket.

Enter the Academy →

Who makes it

AfricanBookMarket is edited by I/O.C.

Contact: ifeanyioc@africanbookmarket.com