women-authors-from-liberia

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

"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"

"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"

"But in spite of all this, freedom here is incomparable; no wonder then that the Negro can be lynched, and yet a Negro can stand and sing My Country Tis of Thee."

"This vast country has everything good and evil. It has sympathetic men and women, who can be as selfish as they can be kind. There is, in the words of Goethe, much light, but also much shade."

"There is very much to learn from the United States, if we can scratch the varnish off the surface and take the woodwork that is solid and not rotten."

"She speaks for herself, and gives a voice to African women and to the incredible experiences she’s had. It defies some accepted ways of thinking."

"Sweden avoided World War II, sparing itself the German occupation that Norway endured and the Soviet invasion suffered by the Finns. During the Cold War, Sweden continued its neutral path...[and] declined to join NATO. And then Feb. 24, 2022, happened. The Russian invasion of Ukraine brought into sharp relief the limitations of being in Europe but not having the security guarantees of NATO’s collective defense pact. The Finns — dragging the Swedes with them — applied for membership in the alliance."

"I have always been a daughter of two countries, in large part because without America, my adopted country, my native country of Liberia would not exist."

"This country took me and my family in when we were at one of the lowest points of our lives and returned to me a feeling I had lost: that of being safe. I was so proud when I eventually took the oath of citizenship and posed for photos, waving an American flag, in front of the courthouse where I was sworn in."