Dreams, Miracles and Jazz: New Adventures in African Writing is a welcome, new collection of 27 short stories by the editors and 25 other writers who range across Africa. They come from nine nations in Anglophone Africa. They range from the Gambia and Sierra Leone to Kenya and south through Zimbabwe to the tip of southern Africa. Six of the writers are from Nigeria and another six from Uganda. Zimbabwe writers have provided four of the stories and Kenyan three. There are two each by authors from South Africa and Sierra Leone (but one of these is set in Ghana). And one short story each from the Gambia, Madagascar and Ghana. Of the 27 authors 16 still live in Africa while the other 11 have become part of the Diaspora.
Helon Habila and Kadija Sesay first met in Washington DC in 2002. They started working on this collection of short stories then. Their objective was to assemble a collection of new writing (not published before) by authors who loved the short story form and had not yet published a novel. Many included in this collection have since gone on to publish outstanding novels. Most of the writers have won awards, including the Caine prize for short story writing that began in 2000. It is awarded annually to an African writer in English and is currently worth 10,000 and a month at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
