Gift Blessing, writer, artist, columnist, public speaker and reading promoter, was born in 2002 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and came to Sweden as a quota refugee. His artistic life began as a rapper at the age of seven. His public breakthrough came in 2021, when he appeared on Sweden’s Got Talent with his poetry and advanced to the final. That same year, at the Gothenburg Book Fair, the Swedish author Björn Ranelid publicly endorsed Blessing, and called for him to be appointed an ambassador for the written word.

In 2025, Blessing made his literary debut with the experimental short story Friedrich Absconditus, a political allegory based on the Cold War assassination of the Congolese freedom fighter Patrice Lumumba.

Central to Blessing’s writing is the archive - its erasure, survival and recovery. The prose oscillates between the encyclopaedism of Jorge Luis Borges, the footnotes of Vladimir Nabokov and the minimalism of Samuel Beckett, while also engaging James Joyce through an exhaustive parody of modernism.

Drawing in part on the literary theory of the Belgian Groupe μ, Blessing appropriates ideas from the Western canon through which the colonial history of his Congo may speak.

In 2026, Blessing joined the jury for Diktträdet, a poetry competition awarded by The Swedish Academy. The same year, he succeeded the writer Julia Mills Sandberg as managing editor of Stories We Tell, where he is currently overseeing an anthology on the theme of cultural identity.