The annual Macondo Literary Festival will unveil the theme for its 2026 edition, Ink, Sea, Silence, on September 4 at Maktaba Kuu, Kenya National Library Service (KNLS), Upper Hill, Nairobi.
The theme launch, scheduled for 4 pm, will bring together writers, readers and literature enthusiasts for a conversation exploring Africa’s cultural heritage, memory, and the politics of archives and museums.
The event will feature Bénédicte Savoy, an expert on the repatriation of African cultural heritage, memory, and the politics of museums, in conversation with writer, poet and filmmaker Ngwatilo Mawiyoo. The discussion will be moderated by Mutanu Kyany’a, a digital society scholar and director of research and programmes at African Digital Heritage.
The conversation, titled Silences of the Archive: Looted Worlds and the Politics of Absence, will examine stories that have been lost, recovered and reimagined, and what they mean today.
The launch will also include a topical quiz, with books by the festival’s 2026 guests up for grabs, as well as a music selection by Kiūri Mburathi.
Macondo is a literary festival that connects Africa’s histories and futures through literature.
Since its establishment in 2019, the festival has explored the role of literature in envisioning past, present and future societies, with a focus on questions that stimulate and motivate African future-crafting and world-making.
It brings together writers, thinkers and artists whose work interrogates histories, futures and the political imagination, while highlighting the diversity of literature from global Africa and beyond.
The festival also seeks to create a community around literature through its Macondo citizens, readers, thinkers and curious people from different walks of life who engage with questions about humanity and the relationship between self and other.
The 2026 Macondo Literary Festival will run from September 18 to 20 at the Kenya Cultural Centre in Nairobi.
The festival’s guests will include Indian poet, translator and novelist Meena Kandasamy; Nigerian writer, art critic, curator and photographer Emmanuel Iduma; Réunion Island author Gaaëlle Bélem; award-winning Botswana writer Lauri Kubuitsile; Egyptian author Yasmine El Rashidi; Sudanese contemporary author Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin; Canadian novelist of Ghanaian heritage Esi Edugyan; Indian and UAE-based author Deepak Unnikrishnan.
Also invited are Nigerian novelist Tochi Eze; Algerian Arabic-language writer, journalist, and translator Saïd Khatibi; award-winning Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira Junior; Kenyan entomologist and evolutionary biologist Dr Ino Martins; Kenyan performing artist and poet Dorphanage; and spoken-word poet, recording and performing artist, humanist, and activist Rebian.
Kenyan contemporary dancer, choreographer, artistic director, teacher, curator and performance critic Adam Chienjo; Kenyan Kiswahili author, teacher, translator and curriculum content developer Dominic Maina Oigo; Kiswahili editor Nicholas Ogal; and Kenyan writer and teacher Edwin Omindo are also on the list.
The festival will also host three masterclasses on September 18: Write to Destroy by India- and UAE-based author Deepak Unnikrishnan; Writing Children’s Stories That Carry History by Swedish-Ugandan author Sheila Kalusumu; and Writing in Protest by Egyptian author Yasmine El Rashidi.
The festival is inviting applications for its free, in-person masterclasses. Registration closes on September 5, with selected participants to be notified of the venue at the Kenya Cultural Centre.
The Macondo Book Society (MBS) is a non-profit organisation founded in 2018 by award-winning novelist Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and journalist Ania Bengelstorff as a literary, creative, intellectual and cultural endeavour inspired by the mythical town of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, a place where reality and imagination intertwine, much like Nairobi.