Ellah Wakatama Allfrey

Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL (born 16 September 1966), is the Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University, and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing.

She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press.

Born in Salisbury, Rhodesia, on 16 September 1966 to Zimbabwean novelist, journalist and publisher Pius Wakatama and entrepreneur and Christian women's rights activist Winnie Wakatama (née Ndoro), Ellah Wakatama spent her formative years between Salisbury and the midwestern USA while her father studied at the University of Iowa.

She returned to Rhodesia at the age of 10, attending Arundel School.

Her return to America was prompted by her college education, which began at Goshen College, where she received a BA in Journalism, ending at Rutgers University, where she earned an MA from the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies.

She now resides in London, UK, working as Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, and Chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing.

She is the sister of writer and natural-birth campaigner Mavhu Farai Wakatama Hargrove and of the late Nhamu Wakatama and Richard Wakatama.

In 2011, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the publishing industry and in 2019 was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, Allfrey was awarded an OBE in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to the publishing industry.

She is series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39 (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction (Dundurn/Cassava Republic).

Her journalism has appeared in the Telegraph, Guardian and Observer newspapers and in the Spectator and The Griffith Review magazines.

She sat on the selection panel for the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship for seven years and served as a literature selector for the Rolex 2014-15 Mentor & Protégée Initiative, as well as serving as chair of the Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship Selection panel for three years.

She sits on the advisory board for Art for Amnesty and the Editorial Advisory Panel of The Johannesburg Review of Books and the Lagos Review of Books.

In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was the Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia.

The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, she was the senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and an assistant editor at Penguin.

A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize.

She is also a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.

She has also been a regular contributor to the books pages of NPR.

Her broadcasting includes reviews for NPR’s All Things Considered and BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review.

In 2019, she was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

She was named Brittle Paper's "African Literary Person of the Year 2019".

an award recognizing individuals who work behind the scenes to hold up the African literary establishment.