“An ambitious new magazine committed to African literature.”
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Instagram
“Essential content, beautiful production. Readers can get inside the literature, and industry insiders can discover new talent.”
—Bernardine Evaristo on Twitter
From culture icon Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to transformational artists Teju Cole and Damon Galgut, to groundbreaking advocates Tsitsi Dangarembga, Chinelo Okparanta, and Maaza Mengiste, to the next generation of voices, Open Country Mag swiftly established itself, in little over a year, as a scene of revelation: the most important platform for Africa’s most important writers. And now, with our expansion into Nigerian film and TV, our mission deepens: we are contextualizing Africa in the global conversation, telling essential, in-depth stories of ideas that shape the continental literary and film cultures, and creating opportunities by linking, for the first time, two influential industries. Our vision, guided by values of integrity and communal support, is to attain that media benchmark that has so far been exclusive to Western organisations: become a truly multiplatform space for cultural storytelling.
I founded Open Country Mag because, despite decades of the global recognition, African literature still lacked a reliable journalistic platform that could authoritatively contextualize its stories, ideas, and writers in the global conversation—and in high quality prose. A more immediate reason was the infiltration of Nigerian literature by human rights-abusing politicians and the subsequent, ongoing backlash against young writers who spoke up against rape culture. Its name came from this generation saying: This country is now open to freedom. I founded it on 5 May 2020, just after World Press Freedom Day, but we launched on 26 December 2020.
In November 2022, we expanded into film and TV.
You can reach out to us at editors@opencountrymag.com or pitch us a proposal at business@opencountrymag.com. You can also follow us and connect on social media:
Visit opencountrymag.com.