Audio: Collector of Memories
Collector of Memories is a story from The Hope, The Prayer, The Anthem. It was shortlisted for the 2021 Afritondo Short Story Prize.
The story can be read here.
Books
Travelling Men Don't Die explores the powerful influence of fate in a collection of captivating stories. Each narrative thread follows characters on their journeys, where unexpected turns and life-altering decisions intertwine with the unseen forces shaping their paths.
You wouldn’t know it was there, the unnumbered house behind the iron-grille gate, just below the craggy rocks of Northcliff ridge. To the untrained eye the rambling property might seem neglected, with its tangle of trees and untamed indigenous bush. But there is purpose here, and a peaceful, subterranean focus on all that withers and dies.
Five strangers—a model, a former nun, a couple in crisis, and an offender newly released from prison—have come here, to this place, to discover an end to life as they’ve known it. Placing their trust in their hosts, the Mortician and Mustafa, the five open their minds and bodies to an alternative experience. Not all of them will survive—or at least not in the way they imagined—but all of them will be shown the limits of their living.
The Institute for Creative Dying is vivid and visceral, unique in its bold and imaginative exploration of mortality and the interconnectedness of all forms of being.
Yellow Means Stay is a collection of enthralling, sad, humorous, and heart-touching love stories from across Africa and the black diaspora. It features new and award-winning writers from across the African continent and beyond. The stories are a dynamic blend of the poetic and narrative, the spousal and familial, the suggestive and explicit, the dramatic and measured, the straight and queer, the sad and humorous, the past and future, life and afterlife. Through its pages, readers enter the world of African literature, love, and romance.
The Hope, The Prayer, The Anthem, is a collection of short stories on identity, love, hope, and self-discovery. Told by rising and award-winning writers from across the African continent and beyond, the stories are a rich blend of suspense, humour, drama, and romance.
Rain Dance is a collection of enthralling short stories on spirituality, identity, and self-discovery. The stories are told by rising and award-winning writers from across the African continent and beyond, and capture rich themes of love, race, and taboo.
Joshua Chizoma is a Nigerian writer. His works have been published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, AFREADA, Entropy Magazine, Kalahari Review, Prachya Review, and elsewhere. His story, “A House Called Joy” won the 2018 Kreative Diadem Prize in the Flash fiction category. He was shortlisted for the 2021 Afritondo Short Story Prize and won the 2020 Awele Creative Trust Short Story Prize. He is an alumnus of the 2019 Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop taught by Chimamanda Adichie.
Fifteen short stories from some of the finest African and Black writers. These stories were on the longlist of the 2025 Afritondo Short Story Prize.
Available for pre-order.
Publication Date: 15 January, 2026.
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“The stories display an exceptional mastery of language and craft. There is no doubt that African storytelling is a fully-fledged discipline with nuance and style.”
Rémy Ngamije, Author of an Eternal Audience of One