About

Musa Okwonga is a poet, essayist, journalist, writer, and musician. His writing has appeared in several outlets. He has published two books on football –  A Cultured Left Foot (2007) and Will You Manage? (2010) – as well as a poetry collection (Eating Roses for Dinner). Okwonga contributed to award-winning anthologies like The Good Immigrant (2016) and Change Gonna Come (2018). One of his essays (“The Good Bisexual”) is included in the upcoming book Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space (ed. Eric Osuwu). His “future blues” band BBXO released its first singles last year and already garnered a good amount of praise. If you want to follow and support his work, you can check out his Patreon. In his The Good Immigrant essay “The Ungrateful Country”, Okwonga wrote about leaving the UK and moving to Berlin. A bit more than two years after the publication, we sat down for a chat in Berlin and spoke about all the things he is up to now, his creative process, the magic of poetry (and how to get into it), what sci-fi and speculative fiction, in general, have to offer, the elusiveness of the label “YA literature”, and how to create in political times like ours.