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Title: Tickling the Ghanaian - Encounters with Contemporary Culture Author: Kofi Akpabli Genre: Non-Fiction/Contemporary Culture Publishers: TREC Pages: 142 Year of First Publication: 2011 Country: Ghana For Kinna's Ghana Literature Week Kofi Akpabli is a creative writer I have come to admire. His is a journalism completely circumscribed by the field of Creative Writing. His style, of combining keen observation, difficult questions and mirthful writing, makes him unique in this expansive field of words, sentences and descriptions; a field where most practitioners resort to sensationalism, outright lies, and trivialisation, stretching an already suspicious occupation to its negative extremum, to grab people's attention and glean some fame for themselves. Such is the shitload on discerning ears that some, having exceeded their elastic limit, have tuned out from radio, permanently. To such individuals, Akpabli's writing has come as a relief. For having g...

This interview was conducted before the launch of Kofi Akpali 's latest book Tickling the Ghanaian: Encounters with Contemporary Culture ,  as a result this interview focuses on his first book A Sense of Savannah: Tales of a Friendly Walk through Northern Ghana . How did you come to write this travelogue? I had the good fortune of being ‘thrown’ off to the north easternmost part of Ghana to do my national service. For a first timer it was a curious, exotic world. My sense of adventure and my curious nature did the rest. By the first three months, I had seen most part of the region including parts of the upper west and Northern Region. Would you even consider this a travelogue? Yes. It is. I had to travel to write every piece. As a freelance writer and journalist I can confide in you that I am in my element when I do travel writing. I enjoy doing it. This book brings smiles to the lips and cheeks of the reader, sometimes even guffaws. You employed a lot of humou...

On August 26, 2011 , at the British Council auditorium, Kofi Akpabli , author of A Sense of Savannah: Tales from a Friendly Walk through Northern Ghana , launched his second book, Tickling the Ghanaian: Encounters with Contemporary Culture.  In this book Kofi seeks to unravel what at all tickles the Ghanaian. Is it Sunday afternoon's after church Omo Tuo and beer, or when Ghana is 'beating' its arch-rivals in sports, Nigeria? Articles in this book include the two that won him the CNN/Multichoice Journalist Award for Arts and Culture back to back in 2010 and 2011, becoming the first journalist, in the award's history, to have won one category back to back: The Serious Business of Soup in Ghana  and What is right with Akpeteshie . Following his usual humorous style of writing, Tickling the Ghanaian  promises to be funny and educating. Kofi takes a different view of what we have perceived as always to be archaic. Kofi has eyes of details and tells his story the best way...

Title: A Sense of Savannah: Tales of a Friendly Walk through Northern Ghana Author: Kofi Akpabli Publishers: TREC Genre: Travelogue Year of Publication: 2011 Pages: 150 Country: Ghana At a time when local tourism has been reduced to annual school excursions to manufacturing plants in Accra and Tema, Kofi Akpabli has opened to the general Ghanaian public and the world at large the beauty locked within a place that's hardly ever travelled to by most Ghanaians, the northern regions comprising Northern Region, Upper East Region and Upper West Region. In this tour-guide cum travelogue, Kofi Akpabli documents his personal experience of travelling to these seemingly remote places in Ghana, mixing his experience with facts. The results of which is a well-crafted book that points to beautiful tourist destinations and the excellent human relations exuded by the people he met. In  A Sense of Savannah  Kofi tried to present to us a different narrative, one tha...

The second Picture Speaks in the past two yeas features a shot from the launch of Kofi Akpali 's humorous travelogue: Sense of Savannah, Tales of a Friendly Walk through Northern Ghana . In the Middle is M. K. B. Asante, a renowned Diplomat and Statesman, followed by the author Kofi Akpabli (in spectacles). The Book was launched at the National Theatre on March 31, 2011 and copies are currently available at all Bookshops in Ghana: Silverbird, Legon Bookshop etc.

A new, witty, travelogue by CNN/Multichoice African Journalist for Arts and Culture, Kofi Akpabli, is about to be launched. The launch date is Wednesday March 30, 2011 . Writing in his very usual manner, Kofi warns at the back of the book Caution: For fear of emitting loud, embarrassing laughs do not read this book in public. Again, I quote what led to the writing of this book. From the back cover: When Kofi Akpabli was posted to the northern border town of Paga to do his national service he thought it was just going to be another 'national suffering.' But when he encountered love at first sight with the landscape and the people, he was soon to realise that something close to destiny tied him to the place. The author was welcomed to a world refreshingly different from the back streets of Accra and Cape Coast. He discovered the smell of dawadawa, the taste of pito , and the mystery of border towns. Over a period of seven years, Kofi criss-crossed the Upper East, Upper West and ...