Nii Ayikwei Parkes (⫽ˌniːˈiˈaɪˈɪkweɪˈpɑːrks⫽;[2] born 1 April 1974),[3] born in the United Kingdom to parents from Ghana, where he was raised, is a performance poet, writer, publisher and sociocultural commentator. He is one of 39 writers aged under 40 from sub-Saharan Africa who in April 2014 were named as part of the Hay Festival's prestigious Africa39 project.[4] He writes for children under the name K.P. Kojo.[5]
Biography
Born in the UK while his parents were studying there, Nii Parkes was raised from the age of three or four in Ghana,[6] where he was educated at Achimota School. His first editorial role was in 1988 working on his school magazine, The Achimotan, and he went on to co-found, at the age of 17, filla! magazine, Ghana's first student-run national magazine.[7] Parkes subsequently studied in England at Manchester Metropolitan University. While there, he emerged as a performance poet and was also a member of the Black Writers' Group of Commonword.[3] He was children's poet-in-residence at the Brighton Festival in 2007.[8]
Parkes runs regular workshops in the UK and set up a Writer's Fund in Ghana to promote writing among the country's youth.[11] He has recorded two CDs of his spoken-word poetry, Incredible Blues and Nocturne of Phrase, and has published three chapbooks of poetry: eyes of a boy, lips of a man, M is for Madrigal, and the self-published Shorter!,[12] which was put together to raise money for the Writers' Fund initiative.
He is also the co-founder (in 2002)[13] and Senior Editor at flipped eye publishing, for whom he compiled fourteen two (editor), Dance the Guns to Silence (co-editor with Kadija Sesay) and x-24: unclassified (co-editor with Tash Aw).
Parkes' short stories can be found in Tell Tales: Volume I (Tell Tales) and The Mechanics' Institute Review (Birkbeck College) and an excerpt from his second fiction manuscript, Afterbirth,[14] was featured in the New Writing 15 anthology published by Granta Books in June 2007.
His debut novel, Tail of the Blue Bird, was published by Jonathan Cape in June 2009, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Translated into French by Sika Fakambi, it was published as Notre Quelque Part by Éditions Zulma, winning the 2014 Prix Baudelaire, Prix Mahogany and Prix Laure Bataillon and being selected by leading literary magazine Lire as the Best First Foreign Book of the year and one of the Top 20 books published in France in 2014.[16]
An experienced performer of his work, Parkes has appeared at readings all over the world, including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, New York; the Royal Festival Hall, London; and Java, Paris, and often leads writing and performance workshops. He was the resident poet at Borders Bookstores, where he hosted the monthly open mic at Charing Cross Road between 2001 and 2005.
Parkes was appointed as the founding director of the Ama Ata Aidoo Centre for Creative Writing (Aidoo Centre), launched in Accra in March 2017, under the auspices of the Kojo Yankah School of Communications Studies at the African University College of Communications (AUCC).[27][28][29]