NYBALF returns to Harlem, September 18–20. Free Festival Registration is open →
Noo Saro-Wiwa
Travel writer • Author
Noo Saro-Wiwa is an award-winning author and travel writer. Born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and raised in England, she is the daughter of the late activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, was named the Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year in 2013. Her second book, Black Ghosts, explores the African community in China and won the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year award in 2024. A graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Noo's work has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, and Condé Nast Traveller. In her latest work, The Burning Ground (2026), she chronicles the complex socio-political landscapes of the oil-rich Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, cementing her reputation as a vital voice in contemporary non-fiction.
Events featuring
this guest
Saturday Sept. 19 2026 • 2:30 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
The Burning Ground: Noo Saro-Wiwa on the Niger Delta
Noo Saro-Wiwa · moderated by Alexis Okeowo
Thirty years after the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight, Noo Saro-Wiwa returns to the Niger Delta to examine what oil has done to land, water, politics, memory, and everyday life. Her new book, The Burning Ground, traces environmental devastation and the insurgencies, compromises, and survival strategies that followed. In conversation with Alexis Okeowo, Saro-Wiwa considers what it means to inherit a place as both family history and national wound, how ecological destruction becomes intimate, and how writing can hold political accountability, memory, inheritance, and the afterlives of political struggle in the same frame.