Africa – a continent of Big Men, wars, abused women, ravaged children, droughts and floods, disease, starvation, criminality, failed states. Such is Africa of the global newscast, daily, nightly. As a challenge issued by the Time of the Writer Festival, writers from inside and outside Africa were invited, rather, to offer flashes of the new: to present an Africa that, while still grappling with problems of the old, is inescapably part of a modern drive towards re-invention and the infinite possibilities of a mobile culture.

The result is Africa Inside Out, an anthology of stories, tales and testimonies that illustrate, above all, the variousness of the now, in which both Africa and the world vacate the past in favour of an unpredictable yet interconnected future.

Edited and introduced by Michael Chapman, the selection presents 18 writers whose award-winning achievements are succinctly captured in the attached biographies.

Michael Chapman, emeritus professor of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, is a leading South African anthologist among whose edited books are The Drum Decade: Stories of the 1950s (1989; 2001), The New Century of South African Poetry (2002) and The New Century of South African Short Stories (2004). His major critical works include the history, Southern African Literatures (1996; 2003), and the collection of essays, Art Talk, Politics Talk (2006). Chapman is acknowledged by the National Research Foundation and is a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.