Sali Andiamo Siyaya

Sali Andiamo Siyaya is a Malawian writer from Blantyre whose work moves freely between crime, horror, poetry, and popular fiction. A multidisciplinary artist, she has developed a literary voice shaped by an interest in suspense, human resilience, power, violence, identity, and the darker corners of ordinary life.

Siyaya's creative career began in music under the name Slova. She recorded her first song, Chains and Tattoos, in 2016 and later became part of the A4AY Making of a Band project in 2019, where she was selected as one of fifteen vocal artists from hundreds of auditionees. She was one of only three women selected for the group and the project's only rapper among the fifteen finalists. She subsequently performed with the band at events including Malawi's Lake of Stars festival while continuing to write and develop her own material. Her background in music remains an important part of her artistic identity, bringing a sense of rhythm, performance, and immediacy to her creative work.

Her literary career has taken an equally wide-ranging path. Siyaya was selected as one of twenty-one international poets featured in The Poetess, an anthology bringing together women writers from countries including Malawi, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, India, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The anthology was conceived as a platform for emerging female poetic voices and was published in 2024.

Siyaya has also contributed poetry and prose to literary publications including Libretto Magazine. Her work The Refugee's Tale has appeared through Libretto Publishers, and she was among the contributors to the magazine's Survival issue, a collection concerned with resilience, identity, social struggle, memory, hope, and cultural inheritance.

Her fiction increasingly explores darker territory. Siyaya has written crime and mafia-centered fiction, including the completed novel The Mafia Academy, a sprawling suspense narrative set within a fictional city controlled by competing criminal families. The novel combines organized crime with family drama, revenge, violence, loyalty, and a female-led coming-of-age story. She is also the author of Fashion and Crime, which follows a fashion designer whose wedding is violently disrupted and whose search for answers draws her into the world of organized crime.

Her interest in horror has likewise found an international audience. Siyaya is a contributing writer to Fearful Symmetries: An Anthology of Psychedelic Horror, published in 2026 by Dionysian Public Library, alongside a group of sixteen writers exploring psychological, surreal, and unsettling forms of horror.

In 2025, Siyaya's literary career reached another significant milestone when she was longlisted for the Quramo Writers' Prize, an African literary prize established to discover and support promising unpublished writers from across the continent and its diaspora.

Siyaya's path from musician and rapper to poet and genre-fiction writer reflects an artist unwilling to remain within a single form. Whether writing about crime, fear, survival, displacement, or the complicated relationships between power and vulnerability, she approaches storytelling as a space where different artistic traditions can meet. Based in Malawi, she represents a new generation of African writers whose work moves comfortably between literary and popular forms while remaining grounded in the imaginative possibilities of contemporary African storytelling.

Works at Moji:

Upcoming 2027

A horror/thriller novel, focused on Malawian folklore.

Anthology Contributor

Contributing poet in the international poetry anthology The Poetess, which features 21 poets from around the world. https://www.amazon.com/Poetess-Blair-Smith/dp/B0D4Y5RJ8M
Contributing writer in Fearful Symmetries: An Anthology of Psychedelic Horror, a collection of horror stories by multiple authors. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vf-thompson/fearful-symmetries-an-anthology-of-psychedelic-horror
Contributing writer in Exorcists of the Dead: Infestation, a collection of Possession and Exorcism stories, published by Wicked Shadow Press https://wickedshadowpress.induswords.in/2026/05/19/new-releases-exorcists-of-the-dead/
Contributing writer in Roots and Rivers: A Collection of Myth and Folklore, published by Lowell & Benson Publishing https://books2read.com/u/mYjrlx
Contributing writer in Space and Time magazine issue 151 https://authortunitiespress.com/b/151
Contributing writer in Divyodaya Journal: A Journal of Poetry and Literature: Volume 1: Issue 1 https://divyodayajournal.blogspot.com/2026/06/divyodaya-journal-first-issue-2026-pdf.html