Making <i>The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo</i>: An Interview with Yaba Badoe

Authors

  • Minna Niemi Uit-The Arctic University of Norway
  • Yaba Badoe

Keywords:

Ama Ata Aidoo, Yaba Badoe, Ghanaian literature, feminist writing, documentary film

Abstract

The British-Ghanaian documentary filmmaker Yaba Badoe has recently finished her new film The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo (2014), which focuses on the life and career of one of the most influential African women writers. Badoe’s films have received much international acclaim and won several prizes. Badoe’s versatile career also includes her work as a producer, fiction writer, and journalist. In this interview she discusses her fictional work, as well as her documentary films, including The Art of on Ama Ata Aidoo.

Author Biographies

Minna Niemi, Uit-The Arctic University of Norway

Minna Niemi is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tromso-Arctic University of Norway. Niemi received her PhD in English from the University at Buffalo in 2011. She recently completed an Academy of Finland-sponsored postdoctoral research grant, and is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Postcolony Revisited: Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Literature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the South African Journal of Philosophy, and Postcolonial Studies.

Yaba Badoe

Yaba Badoe is a prominent British-Ghanaian documentary filmmaker and fiction writer. Badoe’s film The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo (2014) focuses on the life and career of one of the most influential African women writers. Badoe’s other documentaries, focusing on feminist themes in Ghana, include Honorable Women (2010) and The Witches of Gambaga (2010). Badoe is currently working on a film for the organization WoMin focusing on extractivism as experienced by working class women in different regions of Africa. Badoe’s versatile career also includes her work as a producer, fiction writer, and journalist. In her literary career, she has written in different genres. Her first novel, True Murder (2009), is a psychological thriller in the Gothic mystery tradition. In September 2017, her debut novel for Young Adults, A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars, will be published by Zephyr, a day after The Secret of the Purple Lake (2017), a collection of stories written for younger children is published by Cassava Republic.

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Published

2018-07-18

Issue

Vol. 49 No. 2-3 (2018): April-July 2018

Section

Interviews

License

Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the Journal.