Meet the Sauúti Collective. In 2022, ten African writers and creators came together to begin the shared world project which became known as the Sauútiverse.
Find out more about them below.
Adelehin Ijasan
Adelehin Ijasan is an eye surgeon (‘ophthalmologist’ is a mouthful for most people) and writer. His short stories have appeared in The Best of Everyday Fiction, Takahe, On the Premises, The Tiny Globule, Page and Spine, Pandemic publications, Omenana, Sub-saharan Magazine, The Naked Convos, Kalahari Review, Canary Press, Our Move Next anthology and FIYAH. He was nominated for the Commonwealth short story award in 2014 and, more recently, was on the Nommo award long list for speculative fiction. He also made the Locus recommended reading list in 2020. He can be found at www.adeijasan.com.
Akintoba Kalejaye
Akintoba Kalejaye hails from Nigeria. He is a lawyer, comic writer, and graphic artist. Akintoba has brought to life over 20 comics under the umbrella of the award-winning publisher Comic Republic, including the critically acclaimed VISIONARY and METALLA both inspired by Yoruba mythology and Nigerian way of life. He’s also the mastermind behind other thrilling comics like BEATZ, ITAN, VANGUARDS AFTERMATH, and ERU #8 to name a few. Akintoba’s contributions to the comic world have garnered him numerous accolades, including winning “Best Traditional Comic” at the 2017 Comic Connect Award and earning a nomination for “Best Writer” at the 2023 Glyph Awards. Akintoba’s work has caught the attention of Universal Studios, who are currently adapting some of his comic creations into live-action TV series and movies. His 15 years of legal practice have sparked a deep interest in international copyright law, leading him to embark on a fellowship with Harvard University’s prestigious CopyrightX program. When he’s not crafting storylines or practicing law, Akintoba enjoys programming, photography, and video games. His source of inspiration remains his wife Adanna (a doctoral can- didate) and their three young children, Demi (six), Tara (four), and Kunle (two).
Cheryl S. Ntumy
Cheryl S. Ntumy is a Ghanaian writer of short fiction and novels of speculative fiction, young adult fiction and romance. Her work has appeared in FIYAH Literary Magazine; Apex Magazine; Will This be a Problem and Botswana Women Write, among others. Her work has also been shortlisted for the Nommo Award for African Speculative Fiction, the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and the Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship. She is part of the Sauútiverse Collective and a member of Petlo Literary Arts, an organisation that develops and promotes creative writing in Botswana.
Dare Segun Falowo
Dare Segun Falowo is a writer of the Nigerian Weird. Their work draws on cinema, indigenous cosmologies, pulp fiction & the surreal. Their short fiction has appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Dark Magazine, Baffling Magazine and others. They have also contributed to the anthologies of black speculative fiction: DOMINION and AFRICA RISEN. Their lysergic science fiction epic, CONVERGENCE IN CHORUS ARCHITECTURE was longlisted for the British Science Fiction Award for Short Fiction. Dare currently lives in Nigeria, between Ibadan and Lagos, where they are trying to find their truth in text, symbol and spirit. Their first collection of stories, CAGED OCEAN DUB, was published in June 2023.
Eugen Bacon
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author of several novels, prose poetry and collections. She’s a British Fantasy Award winner, a Foreword Book of the Year silver award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in the British Science Fiction Association, Aurealis, Ditmar and Australian Shadow Awards. Eugen was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. DANGED BLACK THING by Transit Lounge Publishing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Visit her website at eugenbacon.com
Fabrice Guerrier
Fabrice Guerrier is a Haitian-American writer, producer and founder of Syllble, a pioneering science fiction and fantasy production house and publisher that creates fictional worlds by connecting diverse creative writers, visual artists and inspired creators from different countries, backgrounds, and cultures through artist collectives. His vision is to bring a new era of storytelling in Hollywood and the publishing world by building vibrant collectives of underrepresented creators producing together within unique fictional universes, publishing the best original work that emerges and growing these worlds through creative collaborations, content creation, and transmedia. He was selected as a 2022 PEN Emerging Voices fellow finalist and a PEN Haiti fellow by PEN America. He was inducted into Forbes 30 Under 30 list and named to Root magazine’s 100 most influential African-Americans.
Ikechukwu “Eye Kay” Nwaogu
Ikechukwu “Eye Kay” Nwaogu is a writer and editor from Nigeria. He credits his siblings with teaching him to read, and his parents with teaching him to tell stories. In 2016, he was awarded a Tony Elumelu scholarship to study screenwriting at a film school in Lagos. That same year, he was Writer-In-Residence at the Ebedi International Writers’ Residency, Nigeria’s premier Writing Residency, in Iseyin, Oyo State. In 2018, his manuscript, THE BOOK OF LOST WORDS was a finalist at the inaugural edition of the GTB Dusty Manuscript Contest, where contest judge and Brittlepaper editor-in-chief, Ainehi-Edoro- Giles, praised his work. In 2019, he was shortlisted again for the Quramo Writers’ Prize, for the same manuscript. His writing interrogates identity and bias through the lens of experience. His writing has been published in various anthologies and publications, most notably The Noirledge Anthology Of Short Fiction, and Horror Without Borders. His hobbies are listening to music, lots and lots of reading, and the occasional swim.
J. Umeh
J. Umeh is a published author, blogger, music producer, film reviewer. He lives and works in the UK as a technology architect and consultant. As a creative artist, technologist and former biologist, Umeh’s interests spans the confluence of technology, art and humanity and this is a theme he explores in his first speculative fiction work Kalabashing. Umeh is passionate about the co-evolutionary tension between emerging technologies and intellectual property (e.g. copyright), and he is a regular conference speaker on these topics, which are also reflected in a lot of his non-fictional works.
Stephen Embleton
Stephen Embleton was born in KwaZuluNatal, South Africa and is a resident in Oxford, after the 2022 James Currey Fellowship at the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford. His first short story was published in 2015 in the IMAGINE AFRICA 500 speculative fiction anthology, followed by the 2016 Edition of Aké Review, the debut edition of Enkare Review 2017 and more. He is a charter member of the African Speculative Fiction Society and its Nommo Awards initiative. His then unpublished fantasy novel, BONES & RUNES, was a finalist in the 2021 James Currey Prize for African Literature, and published in the UK in 2022. He was awarded the James Currey Fellowship, University of Oxford 2022. Stephen is the editor of The James Currey Anthology 2022, featuring short fiction and non-fiction with contributors hailing from Botswana to Nigeria, Ghana to South Africa writing from the Continent or in the diaspora. He is the editor of the 2023 edition of the posthumously published final novel of Flora Nwapa, THE LAKE GODDESS. Stephen is one of the ten African writers making up the Sauúti Collective.
Wole Talabi
Wole Talabi is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. He is the author of SHIGIDI AND THE BRASS HEAD OF OBALUFON (DAW/Gollancz, August 2023) and INCOMPLETE SOLUTIONS(Luna Press, 2019). His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld and other places. His work has been a finalist for the Nebula Award, the Caine Prize, the Locus Award, the Nommo Award and been translated into seven languages. He has edited four anthologies: TALES FROM THE COMING NIGHT (2022, a translation anthology in Bengali), AFRICANFUTURISM(2020, nominated for the Locus Award), LIGHTS OUT: RESURRECTION (2016) and THESE WORDS EXPOSE US(2014). MOTHERSOUND: THE SAUÚTIVERSE ANTHOLOGYis his fifth work as editor. He likes scuba diving, elegant equations, and oddly shaped things. He currently lives and works in Malaysia. Find him at wtalabi.wordpress.com and @wtalabi on twitter.
Xan van Rooyen
Xan van Rooyen is a climber, tattoo collector, and peanut-butter connoisseur. Xan is a non-binary storyteller from South Africa, currently living in Finland where the heavy metal is sooth- ing and the cold, dark forests inspiring. Xan has a Master’s degree in music, and when not teaching enjoys conjuring strange worlds and creating quirky characters. You can find Xan’s stories in the likes of Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Daily Science Fiction, and Galaxy’s Edge among others. They have also written several novels including the YA fantasy MY NAME IS MAGIC, and adult arcanopunk novel SILVER HELIX. Xan hangs out on Instagram and Twitter, so feel free to say hi over there @xan_writer.