Hawa Jande Golakai

"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"

"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"

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