Lemon Tree Publishing & Film a division of Antique Lemonade focuses on film and publishing.  Our main objective is to use film to tell inclusive and sustainable Ghanaian and African stories.

We aspire to share through film, stories that are authentic, entertaining and to document our culture and traditions for the education and enlightenment of future generations.

I was born in April 1968 in Accra, Ghana.  I attended Christ the King International School in Ghana and Saint Marys Secondary School up to sixth form.  I then went to the United Kingdom and studied Communications at Croydon Business College.

My creative journey actually started in primary school when I started writing Christmas plays.  I used my Dad’s old typewriter, spying on my older brothers and documenting all the mischief they got up to whilst my mother was abroad.  I also loved the cinema. The very first films that caught my imagination were ‘Live and Let Die’ in the Bond collection and Ghanaian Director Kwaw Ansah’s ‘Love Brewed in the African Pot.’  As a teenager, I remember watching a ‘Warm December’ starring Sydney Poitier and Esther Anderson and bawling my eyes out after the movie because Poitier lost the woman he loved to another man.

When I became a mother, I realised that there were very few books that my daughter could relate to, and characters that looked like her.  I decided to start writing and had two books published; ‘Dokono the Donkey’ and ‘Koku the Cockerel’.  Those were followed by my first collection of short stories, ‘I Have Time and Other Short stories’ which won the Ama Ata Aidoo Short Story Award in 2018.  My short story ‘Mansa’ was also published in the Caine African Writers Anthology.  This story has also been translated into Spanish.  Other children’s stories include ‘The Kente Curtain’ and two other books pending ‘Kumasi to London’ and ‘Dear Kweku’.  I co-authored a memoir with a prominent citizen with its result the highly recommended book, ‘Sam’.  My first cookbook ‘Kelewele’ is also soon to be published.

In 2017, I co-founded an art space called Antique Lemonade which opened its doors to creatives.  One of our main objectives was to encourage collaboration amongst creatives.  We realised quickly that film and books were a good way of creatives working together.  In 2018 we worked on our first short pilot film project.  The film entitled ‘The Secret Number’ was premiered in January 2019.

I have started creative writing workshops for young people and led my first international workshop entitled, ‘Finding Your Voice’, in Maastricht, Netherlands for Maastricht University. This workshop mirrored one of my creative life goals which is to encourage children to create their narratives.  My mission is to tell African stories that will inspire the next generation and help them to grow in confidence in order to make positive contributors to African and the world at large.