A Long House has announced Kelechi Njoku and Clarie Gor as it’s inaugural Rajat Neogy Editorial Fellows.
The Rajat Neogy Editorial Fellowship is named after Rajat Neogy, in recognition of his active years as editor and founder of Transition Magazine, curating and publishing some of the best minds on the continent and beyond.
Clarie Gor, Kenyan writer and journalist, and Kelechi Njoku, writer and renowned editor, were chosen as the 2022 Rajat Neogy Editorial Fellows for their “brilliance, deep interest in the African literary ecosystem, and imaginative strategies on how to not only make room for black writers, thinkers, artists, but also, a black audience,” according to a statement by A Long House—administrators of the Neogy Fellowship.
Clarie and Kelechi would receive editorial training and support, as well as a cash award of $1000 each.
During his years as editor at Transition, Rajat produced 44 issues of Transition before handing over to Wole Soyinka after Transition No. 44, published in 1974. The reasons for this might be due to his undying devotion to alcohol, which dealt as much damage to his body as it did to his affiliation with his family.
The quality of his publications earned him an unpleasant vacation in prison, alongside AbubakarKakyamaMayanja, a lawyer and parliamentarian whose critique and letter published in Rajat’s Transition, paid for their stay at the maximum security prison at Luriza in 1968.
Some of the great minds whose thoughts are smeared on the pages of Transition Magazine are: Chinua Achebe; James Baldwin; Peter Enahoro; Keneth Kaunda; Martin Luther King Jr.; John Mbiti; Gerald Moore; V. S. Naipaul; James Ngugi (NgugiWaThiongo); Lewis Nkosi; Julius Nyerere; Christopher Okigbo; Wole Soyinka; and Paul Theroux.
Although Rajat breathed his last on December 3, 1995, the man’s legacy is alive in all African writers, Clarie Gor and Kelechi Njoku inclusive, who are committed to fanning the flames of editorial culture in the African literary cosmos.
Below are the amazing griots, recipients of the 2022 Rajat Neogy Editorial fellowship:
Clarie Gor
Clarie Gor is a Kenyan writer and Journalist. She is currently interested in creating work that centers Black women and feminisms; that is an exploration of the various dynamics of violence and the possibilities of collective imagination and conversation.
Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Equipoise, the 2020 anthology of the Nairobi Writing Academy, Catapult, Smoke Long Quarterly, The Audacity, Kalahari Review and others. Her flash creative nonfiction essay, ‘This Song My God, I Have Wept!’ won the February 2019 Igby Prize for nonfiction. All her work is archived on https://clariesramblings.com. She lives in Kenya.
Kelechi Njoku
Kelechi Njoku has worked with several organisations devoted to spotlighting literature in Africa—the Afritondo Short Story Prize; Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop; Dusty Manuscript Prize, Nigeria; Aké Arts and Book Festival; and Writivism Short Story Prize.
He has edited three issues of Bakwa magazine, two of 14, and several other book and literary projects with independent publishers, Kachifo and Narrative Landscape Press. His writing appears in adda, Litro, This Is Africa, and Brittle Paper. In 2020, he was writer-in-residence at Black Rock, Dakar, Senegal. He lives in Nigeria.
[Some accounts on RajatNeogy are sourced from here]
