Portia Dery
Ghanaian writer
Portia Dery is a writer from Ghana who is best known for her children's stories but she also writes short stories and poetry. Her works have been published in various magazines, anthologies and platforms, including the UK poetry library, Arts Beat, Africa's first anthology, and the Ayiba magazine.
In 2016, Portia Dery received a fellowship from the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders Initiative and, among other things, developed The Funky Read Write Clinic , a programme for promoting children's reading and writing skills. Since 2013, she has been active in the field of children's literacy, founding the African Youth Writers Organization (AYWO) initiative. At that time, she worked in a rural area of Ghana for the Department of Community Development and Social Welfare covering gender equality, economic fundamentals, literacy and health. Dery was among the runners for the 2016 Queen's Young Leaders Award.
The author won the Children's Africana Book Award for her book, Grandma's List 2018, which honours five children's and teen books on Africa each year. She shares the award with the book's South African illustrator, Toby Newsome. The book tells the story of an eight-year-old girl, Fatima, who wants to help her grandmother. She receives from the grandmother a list of errands, but on losing the list, she tries to remember what was on it.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q53224665. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2016, 2013 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Portia Dery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.