Ahmet Sait Akcay

Ahmet Sait Akcay is an African Studies scholar, literary critic, and doctoral candidate in African Studies at the University of Cape Town. He received a BA in Comparative Literature from Istanbul Bilgi University and an MA in History from Yildiz Technical University, Turkey. He has consistently contributed to literary journals and newspapers for over twenty years. He worked as a translator and journalist at a news agency for almost five years before coming to Cape Town. He completed an MPhil degree in African Studies at the University of Cape Town, focusing on modernist African poetry. In his PhD dissertation project, he examines the question of hospitality and spatiality in Nuruddin Farah’s novels. Akcay has authored five short story collections and three critical books, including Reading Orhan Pamuk: The Impossible Allegories of Reading, Houris in Mind: A Critical Analysis to Islamic Populist Culture, and Modern African Literature in Turkish. He was the editor of Turkish journal HECE’s special issue for Africa which covers major debates in social science in Africa. He also translated R.R.R Dhlomo’s An African Tragedy and Gebreyesus Hailu’s Conscript into Turkish. His work appeared in Social Dynamics, Research Africa, The Annual Review of Islam in Africa (ARIA), The Johannesburg Review of Books and African Books Collective.

His recent publications: ‘Introduction’ to Harry Garuba’s poetry collection Shadow and Dream: Alive in Poetry  (Langaa RPCIG, 2023): “Reading Walter Rodney as Decolonial Thinker?”, Social Dynamics, 48:3, 2023.