Photograph: Godfred Goodman

Yaw Atuobi is a writer, curator, and an independent researcher who works within the nexus of fiction, criticism and visual culture.

They approach the problem of representation as a network of political, aesthetic and ethical strategies for inhabiting the world. An encounter with the image provides an opportunity to explore the workings of representational regimes. What can be seen, held and interpreted foregrounds itself while eliding the gaps that propel meaning-making. It is one of the aims of fiction and criticism to chart these lacunae. They are interested in the other relations can be produced outside illustration - relations that generate rather than reveal. Without fetishizing obscurity, their work explores what the hidden reveals about our processes of inward illumination.

A co-curator of littoral zone[s], 2025 writing fellow at A Public Space and the former critic-in-residence at the inaugural Black Atlantic Residency (2024) of the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD), Yaw is committed to emphasising the generative and constitutive role of criticism in the production of both visual and literary culture within continental Africa and its diaspora. Their fiction, conversations, criticism, translation (into Akan) and other projects can be found or are forthcoming in A Public Space Magazine, PARSE Journal, Za! Magazine, Jalada Africa, AKO Caine Prize for African Writing Anthology, Reading Ecologies: Transforming Publishing in Africa, and elsewhere.

Yaw was previously an EXITFRAME CRITLabs Fellow, and was selected for the AKO Caine Prize Writing Workshop, the Goethe-Institut/SBMEN Art Writing and Criticism Workshop, and the Ebedi International Writers Residency, among others. They have worked with the Writers Project of Ghana, Miss Read: Berlin Art Book Fair, HBFK, Ashesi University, and Goethe-Institut.

Yaw is currently an associate of the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Accra. They are also working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

YAW ATUOBI