大象传媒

Ndibulele Sobhoyisi and Estiaan Swanepoel are both 18 years old, and best friends. They're from South Africa's Eastern Cape and last week they returned from a month at a Xhosa initiation school. This is an important coming of age ritual, where boys are sent away to become men, and part of it involves being circumcised by a spear. This can be very dangerous - it's reported that around 45 boys a year die from complications following botched circumcisions - and others have lost their penises. Estiaan's decision to go with his Xhosa friend caused quite a stir, because he is white Afrikaans.

Nigerian writer A. Igoni Barrett has won awards for his short stories, but now he's written a first novel called Blackass. It tells the story of a young man from Lagos who wakes up one morning to find his skin has turned white - apart from his bottom which has stayed black.

The Syrian journalist Samar Yazbek is an outspoken opponent of President Assad's regime - despite being a member of the same Alawite group. She was forced to leave her homeland in 2011 after she received death threats, and currently lives in exile in France. In 2012 she won the PEN Writer of Courage award, and her latest book The Crossing follows three secret trips she took to the north of Syria.

Doraje Eberle is an Austrian woman who's been working in Bosnia since the wars of the early 1990s. She's helped hundreds of families to return to their homes and has won numerous international prizes for her work. But in 2011, she decided to help the children of the region, by setting up a music school in Srebrenica - where some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred by Serb forces in 1995.

Credit: Getty images