Event information
Three novelists whose recent work unsettles the boundary between the ordinary and the otherworldly join this panel on speculative fiction. I.O. Echeruo, John Hunt and Keely Shinners are interviewed by writer and academic Kelly-Eve Koopman.
Echeruo's fiction is grounded in African cosmologies, a theme explored further in a companion session elsewhere in the programme. Hunt has built a body of work that moves between realism and the fantastic, while Shinners' recent fiction has drawn attention for unconventional narrative structures that examine queerness and coming of age in unstable worlds.
The panel considers how each writer constructs fictional realities that resist easy categorisation, touching on influences ranging from magical realism to Afrofuturism. Discussion is expected to cover craft decisions such as shifting points of view, non-linear time and unreliable narration, alongside what speculative modes allow each author to explore about identity and place.
The session sits within Open Book Festival's wider focus on fiction that reworks familiar boundaries of genre.