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Peace Adzo Medie is a scholar and a writer out of Ghana who has pounded the lives of two cousin sisters of a joint family and served them up like fufu , the spongy cassava or plantain ball that is a West African staple. Just as fufu has bounced into the plates of health-obsessed netizens, Medie’s intergenerational family saga nestled in the crook of the fabled gold coast of Western Africa has thrust Ghana into the literary limelight. Medie has traversed many time zones in her own life.

While she was born in Liberia, her fictional world is set firmly in Ghana. After her initial schooling in Ho, a town in the interior of Ghana, her family moved to Accra, the capital. She obtained a Ph.



D in public and international affairs from the University of Pittsburgh, and is currently an Associate Professor of gender politics at the University of Bristol. In her latest novel Nightbloom , shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, Medie has a somewhat bipolar vision in creating parallel lives for her characters, Akorfa and Selasi. They are cousins born on the same day in 1985, one in the rural city of Ho, the other in the capital of Accra.

She draws the reader so smoothly into the life of Akorfa, the only child of her upwardly mobile parents, that we get seduced into seeing Selasi as the poor cousin. Selasi is orphaned by the death of her once-vibrantly-alive mother who passed away giving birth to her brother, and is later abandoned by her father. Author Peace Adzo Medie| Photo.

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