The Macondo Literary Festival gets underway in Nairobi on Friday, September 18, with free entry for all for the opening ceremony; no tickets required.
The ceremony will begin at 4.30 pm at the Kenya Cultural Centre, offering readers, writers, artists and anyone curious about the festival a chance to join and participate.
The opening marks the start of the 2026 edition of Macondo, which runs from September 18–20 under the theme “Ink, Sea, Silence.”
This year’s festival focuses particularly on questions of cultural memory, archives and the ways African stories have been recorded, preserved, forgotten or told by others.
“Africa’s story has been inscribed by many hands, not always in goodwill. It has been subject to the constrained and often violent imagination of others: re-inked, overwritten, twisted into shapes that served predatory visions, not truth,” Macondo Book Society co-founder Anja Bengelstorff said of this year’s edition.
The free opening is therefore an opportunity to step into the festival before the interactive and immersive programme begins over the weekend.
Among the writers featured in this year’s programme are Esi Edugyan, Meena Kandasamy, Emmanuel Iduma, Yasmine El Rashidi, Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, Lauri Kubuitsile, Itamar Vieira Junior, Deepak Unnikrishnan, Tochi Eze and Saïd Khatibi, alongside Kenyan and other African writers and artists.
