Tourism Minister To Launch Book At Goethe-Institut

Minister for Tourism Arts & Culture, Catherine Afeku, will launch 'The God's Who Send Us Gifts', an anthology of African short stories edited by Ivor Agyeman-Duah, at the Goethe-Institut in Accra on Wednesday, May 30.

With forewords by Wole Soyinka and Valerie Amos, it was published in 2017 to mark the 55^th anniversary of the historic African Writers Conference, which was held in 1962 at Makerere University, Uganda.

A visiting associate professor and director of the Wole Soyinka Foundation at the University of Johannesburg, Agyeman-Duah, who will be reading excerpts from the book, is the chairman of the advisory council of the Heritage and Cultural Society of Africa. He also serves on the board of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board.

A literary historian, editor and fiction-writer, he edited the well-received anthologies 'All the Good Things Around Us', 'Crucible of the Ages – Essays in Honour of Wole Soyinka at 80' and 'May Their Shadows Never Shrink – Wole Soyinka & The Oxford Professorship of Poetry' – with Prof Emeritus Lucy Newlyn of the University of Oxford, UK.

A development specialist and former special advisor on international development co-operation to former President John Agyekum Kufuor, he also serves on the SDG Philanthropy Platform of the UNDP in Ghana. He is author and co-editor of 'Pilgrims Of The Night: Development Challenges And Opportunities In Africa', 'Africa – A Miner's Canary into the Twenty-First Century', 'Essays on Economic Governance' and 'An Economic History of Ghana'.

He has served as visiting research fellow at the Exeter College of the University of Oxford and the Hutchins Institute at Harvard University, a centenary research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London (UK).

He has graduate degrees from the London School of Economics, the School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of Wales. Writers Project of Ghana and the Goethe-Institut are organising the launch.