MUSA OKWONGA + CATHY RENTZENBRINK: IN THE END, IT WAS ALL ABOUT LOVE
About the event
Join us for a discussion and Q&A with writer, broadcaster and musician Musa Okwonga, facilitated by acclaimed memoirist and author of The Last Act of Love Cathy Rentzenbrink. They discuss Musa’s work with a focus on his recent novel In The End, It Was All About Love (Rough Trade, 2021).
In The End, It Was All About Love is set in Berlin. As the narrator approaches his fortieth birthday, nearing the age where his father was killed in a brutal revolution, he drifts through this endlessly addictive and sometimes mystical city, through its slow days and bottomless nights, wondering whether he will ever escape the damage left by his father’s death. This powerful memoir is a journey of loss and self-acceptance that takes its nameless narrator all the way through bustling Berlin to his roots, a quiet village on the Uganda-Sudan border. It is a bracingly honest story of love, sexuality and spirituality, of racism, dating, and alienation; of fleeing the greatest possible pain, and of the hopeful road home.
Musa’s other publications include One of Them (Unbound, 2021), a memoir about his five years at Eton College, and Striking Out (Scholastic, 2021), a children’s novel written in collaboration with and based on the life of Ian Wright. Musa has also published a collection of poetry and three books about football, the first of which, A Cultured Left Foot, was nominated for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. Musa’s work has appeared in various outlets, including Africa Is A Country, The Byline Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist and The Ringer. He lives in Berlin.
Praise for Musa:
Musa is precise and all-encompassing in the same line. His poetry is intimate and erudite, passionate and beautiful.
KAE TEMPEST
Deeply affecting.
IRISH TIMES (Best Books of the Year 2021, In the End, It Was All About Love)
*This online event will be held as a limited-capacity Zoom webinar. Registrants will receive Zoom joining details the day before the event and again 1 hour before the event.*
