This special issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, guest edited by Bénédicte Ledent and Daria Tunca, is devoted to the theme of "Illuminating Lives: The Biographical Impulse in Postcolonial Literatures".

Table of contents

Articles

Towards a definition of postcolonial biographical fiction
Daria Tunca and Bénédicte Ledent

Writing the biofictive: Caryl Phillips and The Lost Child
Stephen Clingman

When is biography fiction? Life writing, epistemophilia, and the limits of genre in contemporary Kenyan writing
Madhu Krishnan

“Tell it slant”: Postcoloniality and the fiction of biographical authenticity in Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father
Delphine Munos

Rewriting Dostoevsky: J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg and the perverted truths of biographical fiction
Marie Herbillon

Performing Ellen: Mojisola Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (2008) and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860)
Suzanne Scafe

“Not walled facts, their essence”: Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound and Camille Pissarro
Maria Cristina Fumagalli

Writing Bennelong: The cultural impact of early Australian biofictions
Catherine Padmore and Kelly Gardiner

The Black Messiah: Writing Equiano
Chika Unigwe

Interview

“A growth to understanding”: An interview with Caryl Phillips about biographical fiction
Bénédicte Ledent, Caryl Phillips and Daria Tunca

Afterword

Afterword: Writing lives, fictions, and the postcolonial
Liz Stanley