novelists-from-liberia

"I can do something positive that can prompt people to say: ‘Oh, so this is a Liberian author"

"So crime really is a cross cutting in any society, I don’t care where you live in this world. Crime is publicist and I think with the way the world is now, crime is becoming a fascination for the public"

"Well I think it would be some of the problems you find in general in undeveloped countries like the issues of literacy. A lot of women, they have the dreams to write but you need a back ground of education or some form of education and that’s something a lot of people still don’t have – a platform of elementary school education. But when you’re young, whatever you’re good at its something that people should encourage in you and that’s another thing. As Africans, we need to really engender that form of pride and motivate our children, regardless of what the child wants to do, I think we should support it. Because like I always say to people, the world had enough problems without having your families not backing you in pursuit of your dream. So we need to really pay attention, if you see a child has a gift, you should nurture that gift in your child because, I mean, there are African writers – men and women -- who fought against the odds but now they are household names in Africa. And these people came up in a time where the colonial perception of Africa was such that nobody could really bring anything positive out of this continent, so definitely no literary genius can come and these people really broke all the odds"

"So often the detective is a man and the woman is his lovely wife who the detective goes home to. We are just the background noise"

"Science can be challenging but literature and art, that’s like home to me. I used to live in bookstores"

"It never occurred to me in my mind as an African I could actually get published and be on the shelves like those people"

"Mysticism is a theme that is wedded to African culture, that people see things and perceive things in different ways"

"His seminal work, Murder in a Cassava Patch, was something I read very deeply and [it] took time to sink it in. I thought a lot about my writing when reading it, deciding the kind of crime fiction writer I wanted to be"

"In all the books that Cassava is promoting, they can see that this is not ‘Africa"

"A lot of people want to categorise you when you’re writing crime fiction [as an African] – ‘Which part of Africa are you writing about"

"I’m trying to showcase that when people write from anywhere in the world they’re telling stories that they can relate to"

"It more than frustrates me, it pisses me off! That is not the narrative of my country in total. Whenever news comes out of there it dwarfs the country itself: it’ll be Charles Taylor in the Hague, or Ebola and thousands dead, but the positive stories don’t leak out further than the region"

"in anything that you do, you have to have a lot of determination and self-confidence. Always persevere, be honest with your work and always be ready to take criticism. Be diligent and basically send your work around as much as possible."

"I think usually a lot of African kids, if they have any artistic inclination, their parents tend not to really take it seriously because the market for artists won’t be serious. So you’re always told to have a degree in order to make a living out of it. So that was the same case with me, I never really took my writing seriously even though I have been writing since I was a kid"

"Gortokai, you have done so much for my old parents, we owe it to you to give you a wife. If I had a husband with money."

"....times are changing. It’s hard to depend on people these days."

"I can see why Gotorkai has been killing himself to make enough money to pay your dowry."

"You think I have just been eating rice for nothing eh? I am an old kuba, Kema."

"If you are a professional palm wine drinker, that is, a habitude, or a connoisseur, the most sensible thing to do when you arrive in a strange town is to associate yourself with a palm wine circle. By so doing you get to know all the current gossip of that town."

"My advice to you as a friend is, never contemplate such a major undertaking without it being looked into."

"Gortokai, when you have reached my age, you will agree that good rum, delicious food and some money, not too much, to keep you worrying, are to be desired more than a beautiful unfaithful woman."

"Many men before us have been through it, and those who will come after us too, will go through it. It’s one of those evils God put on earth. You know now what I mean when I say the secrets of a woman are deeper than the bottom of hell."

"Some people who pretend to be your friends are the very ones who help to spoil your palava."

"I feel that a girl should be given a chance to look around before she decides on one man."

"You see eh, when we old people tell you children to listen to your parents, you say this is a new age."