top of page
Kosi Komla-Ebri
Foto_Kossi by Brent2_edited.jpg

Kossi Komla-Ebri

Togo/ Italy

Kossi Amékowoyoa KOMLA-EBRI (born 1954 in Togo) arrived in Italy in 1974 and is a retired surgeon. He is the author of the short story collection Home (2022), the novel Neyla (2004) and the reflections EmbarRACEments: Daily Embarrassments in Black and White...and Color (Crossings). He was awarded the 2005 „Premio Mare Nostrum for Literature“ and „Premio Graphein“ in 2009. The novel Neyla won the Prato CittAperta prize dedicated to migrant culture in 2019. He is a founding member of "El-Ghibli" online magazine of migration literature.
What you can't miss:
kossi home web.jpg

"Home" finds Kossi Komla-Ebri between places and identities, cultures and languages, expectations and realities, Europe and Africa. Across these eleven short stories, Komla-Ebri crosses genres and borders with an expansiveness that welcomes readers into an ever increasing interconnected world and all the struggles that come with it.

kossi embaracements.png

There is a noisy racism, that of insults, of hits, the one that kills.  But there is also a silent racism, banal, sometimes unconscious, involuntary or that is meant to be funny but that can equally humiliate and discriminate. Kossi Komla-Ebri exposes with bitter irony exasperating and disturbing episodes of everyday racism.
The theme is the embarrassment of the difference.  The diversity - in particular that of the colour of the skin - which, in society, often leads migrants and natives to confront each other daily, in situations on the borderline between embarrassment and racism precisely those of the "EmbarRACEments".
Kossi's book, besides making people smile, triggers a reflection on the concepts of belonging, integration, migration, identity.

libro-neyla-novel-kossi-komla-ebri2.jpg

The theme of this novel is not so much love, as what this feeling wants to mask, or the problems experienced by all those who have had to deal with setting foot on their land. Kossi Komla-Ebri, the most Lombard of the new African authors, makes us reflect and move. It speaks to us of departures and returns, of assimilation and cultural identity, but it does so by renouncing the literary archetypes of immigration, any nostalgic autobiographism, to instead leave free space to the creativity contained in the personal baggage of all migrants.

© 2024 by Macondo Book Society. Proudly created with Wix.com. 

bottom of page