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Stories we hope to find

‘Books are sometimes windows, offering views of the world that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.

Rudine Sims Bishop.

At Accord Literary we are hoping to find books that will offer people around the world both windows and mirrors into lives lived on the African continent. We are looking for stories that are brave, bold, family-based, fantasy, historical, futuristic, funny, sad … any story that is told with a passionate and original voice by an author who is telling it as only they can. We want stories that will entertain and educate, stories that will address issues that are not often portrayed in literature for young readers and stories that will stay in the minds and hearts of readers long after the last page has been read.

If you think that you have something that fits one or another part of this description we would love to read it and if we love it too we would like to help to take it to readers all over the world so that a child in London or Nairobi, New York or Lagos, Melbourne or Johannesburg can read it and feel excited to find out about a young person's life in another place or to read about a young person's life that is like their own. As Rudine Sims Bishop said so wonderfully, fiction acts as a window and a mirror and we all need to understand one another better as well as feel the power of seeing someone like ourselves in a book.