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I wouldn't mind my book being called an African novel if it didn't invite lazy readings.

Taiye Selasi

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Taiye Selasi
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: November 2
Photographer
Writer
London
England
Wouldn
Novel
Called
Reading
Readings
Didn
Invite
Book
Invites
Mind
African
Lazy

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Sight is subjective. We learned that in class.
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I'm not sure where I'm from! I was born in London. My father's from Ghana but lives in Saudi Arabia. My mother's Nigerian but lives in Ghana. I grew up in Boston.
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As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own.
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I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.
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I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.
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I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims.
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As a young woman, I had been seeking experience, knowledge, truth, the stuff writers need in their work, but when the artist actually kicked in, I came to understand that in this romantic relationship I was not free to be myself, or to find myself, in order to begin the true work I needed to do.
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I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.
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I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.
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So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.
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The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness.
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Being a twin, and being my sister's twin, is such a defining part of my life that I wouldn't know how to be who I am, including a writer, without that being somehow at the centre.
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I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!
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When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.
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When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.
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As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.
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I've written fiction for as long as I can remember it's always been my preferred form of play.
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The summer I finished my first novel Ghana Must Go, I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lomé to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.
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I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims.
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