Writing
The Gold Paradox
Manuscript completed, currently being edited by Cornerstones Literary Consultancy. Literary historical fiction. Approximately 73,000 words.
Set on the border of the British Gold Coast and French Togoland in the early twentieth century, The Gold Paradox follows Selom, a boy drawn into the machinery of empire through translation, mapping, and record keeping. As he learns how power hides inside paper, he begins to keep a counter ledger that records what official archives erase. Moving between West Africa and Britain, the novel examines how knowledge becomes a weapon, and how silence can be trained into method.
The African Scientist
In progress. Literary scientific novella.
Set between Accra, Cambridge, Rome, and Stanford, The African Scientist follows Elorm Quarshie, a brilliant Ghanaian researcher pursuing his PhD at Cambridge University, who is dispatched to a Roman laboratory under the pretence of advancing his work in the field of gene editing, while in reality being quietly removed from the centre of recognition and influence. Left alone in a well-funded, elite but abandoned facility, he begins working on decrypting a virus no one has been able to decipher, one capable of causing the deaths of millions.
The novel examines what becomes of a man taught to obey the method before he is taught to question it.
Farida Dzifa Alabo is a writer of historical African fiction. Her work examines how colonial systems are sustained through language, record keeping, classification, and inheritance. The Gold Paradox is her first novel.