WOW President Margarita Al's greeting to African writers at a panel discussion in Nigeria
Colleagues, friends! It is a great honor for me to greet you at this panel discussion and it is a feast of poetry and literature. Please accept my sincere congratulations and wishes to achieve success and a high level of creativity. I hope your books and works will find the way to the hesrts of the readers. So that your words have a great impact on the minds of our contemporaries and so that each of your books carries the idea of peace and solidarity between the people of our small planet Earth. Margarita represents the World Organization of WOW Writers. And very soon we will fly to the most mysterious and attractive continent Africa. and I've already fallen in love with Nigeria, just because people like Wale Okediran live and work and create there. It will be a great pleasure for us to accept your creative works for the competition. There's not much time left, until March the 1st, but I'm sure you'll make it. WOW has an anthem and it will be played on April 4-6 in Abuja, Nigeria. And there are very important words. We are people of the same planet and poetry unites us.
0 Sincerely, the president of the World Organization of Writers WOW, Margarita Al
Thanks to Olga Medvedko's professional translation, I was able to fully participate in the panel discussion.
Olga Medvedko briefly but in full about the panel discussion in Abuja.
The main issues discussed were:
Should poetry be pleasant and joyful to read, or should it raise acute issues of the world and being, and give food for thought?
Is African literature a part of world literature? How, to what extent? How to do it and promote it? African writers create their own, without looking back at the tastes of the West.
There are two aspects in literature - personal, the theme of personality and political. How do these two themes connect and penetrate each other? They must be connected. African writers should not be excluded from politics.
The relationship between creativity and the market. A real writer should not be led by the market and the conjuncture, but be guided by his ideas and creative ideas.
How many publishers are there in Africa? How to increase the profit from books? How to teach young people to read books?
It is necessary to write in their African languages, to develop national literature. And English is the connecting language for everyone.
You need to learn your own history and the role of the writer is important here. Often there is not even a history textbook in schools, that's where the role and responsibility of the writer is huge.
