Granta Books in June 2007. Also a playwright, his début play Walking Waterfall ran at London’s Almeida Theatre on 30 July and 31 July 2008, as part of the Tiata Fahodzi 2008 Tiata Delights season. The production was directed by Femi Elufowoju Jr., and featured a cast including Jude Akuwudike and Marcy Dolapo Oni. It later toured in East Anglia. His debut novel, Tail of the Blue Bird, was published by Jonathan Cape in June 2009, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Translated into French by Sika Fakambi, it was published as Notre Quelque Part by Éditions Zulma, winning the 2014 Prix Baudelaire, Prix Mahogany and Prix Laure Bataillon and being selected by leading literary magazine Lire as the Best First Foreign Book of the year and one of the Top 20 books published in France in 2014. An experienced performer of his work, he has appeared at readings all over the world, including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, New York; the Royal Festival Hall, London; and Java, Paris, and often leads writing and performance workshops. He was the resident poet at Borders Bookstores, where he hosted the monthly open mike at Charing Cross Road between 2001 and 2005. He became BookTrust's online writer-in-residence in 2009. In 2010 he became a writer-in-residence for the charity First Story. He also ran the African Writers' Evening series at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden. In 2012, Parkes represented Ghana at Poetry Parnassus at the Southbank Centre in London, the largest international poetry festival in the UK held in conjunction with the London Olympics. In autumn 2014 the University of Tübingen welcomed him and his fellow writers Taiye Selasi, Priya Basil and Chika Unigwe and to that year's Writers' Lectureship, all of them writers representing what Selasi calls Afropolitan Literature. In 2014–15, Parkes was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales. He was selected as one of Africa's 39 most promising authors under the age of 40 for the World Book Capital Africa39 project in 2014. Parkes ran the Creative Writing course at the African University College of Communications (AUCC) in Accra, Ghana, and sat on the Board of Trustees of pan-African literary initiative Writivism, with fellow writers Zukiswa Wanner, Chika Unigwe, NoViolet Bulawayo, E. C. Osondu and Lizzy Attree until 2015. Parkes was appointed as the founding director of the Ama Ata Aidoo Centre for Creative