It is in our core values. Editorial courage. We mention it on our About page and in our submissions guidelines. But what does it actually mean? We want to try to be precise about it, because vagueness in editorial identity is its own kind of cowardice.
Editorial courage does not mean shock. It does not mean difficulty for its own sake, or darkness as a default register, or transgression as brand identity. A press that publishes difficult work to appear serious is not brave — it is performing. We are not interested in that.
What we are interested in is the manuscript that tells a truth its writer was afraid to tell.
Editorial courage, as we use the term, means a willingness to publish work that makes a genuine argument about the world — through character, through form, through voice — even when that argument is uncomfortable. It means standing behind a book that readers might resist before they understand it. It means trusting the writer enough to let the work be what it is, rather than what we think the market wants it to be.
What this means in practice
It means we are interested in manuscripts that take formal risks — novels structured in unexpected ways, non-fiction that refuses the conventions of its genre, essay collections that treat the form as an argument rather than a container.
It means we are interested in subject matter that is absent or underrepresented in the existing West African literary conversation — stories from LGBTQ+ writers, from writers with disabilities, from writers whose class or ethnic backgrounds have not historically been centred in Nigerian literary fiction.
It means we will not ask a writer to soften what is urgent in their work in order to make it easier to sell. We will work with writers to make their work as strong as possible. That is not the same thing.
It also means that editorial courage has limits we take seriously. We are not a press without aesthetic standards. We are not interested in work that harms without purpose, that uses marginalised identities as backdrop, or that mistakes rawness for craft. Courage and rigour are not opposites. The best work is both.
A note to writers
If you have a manuscript that you have been told is too difficult, too specific, too strange, or too political — and you believe in it — we would like to read it. That is what we are here for. Our submissions are open, and we read with genuine attention.
