Archive for the ‘Africa’ Category
by Carolyn on May 16th, 2013
A contingent of South African authors will be taking part in Etonnants Voyageurs in France from 18 -20 May this year – a continuation of the partnership with the Open Book festival, which saw ten French speaking authors participating in the Cape Town fest last year.
Representing SA lit in Saint-Malo this week will be Mark Behr, Kevin Bloom, André Brink, Damon Galgut, Michiel Heyns, Kopano Matlwa, Deon Meyer, Niq Mhlongo, Kgebetli Moele, Mike Nicol and Richard Poplak.
Other African writers taking part in Etonnants Voyageurs this year include Uwem Akpan, Sefi Atta, Teju Cole, Alain Mabanckou and Noo Saro-Wiwa.
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Press release
A significant number of South African authors will be boarding planes later this week to participate in Etonnants Voyageurs. Some of you may remember the exciting partnership we forged with the French Festival in 2012, which saw 10 French speaking authors join us for Open Book last year…we are delighted that the partnership continues and that they will be welcoming the same number of South Africans at their festival!
Authors who will be travelling are – in alphabetical order – Mark Behr, Kevin Bloom, André Brink, Damon Galgut, Michiel Heyns, Kopano Matlwa, Deon Meyer, Niq Mhlongo, Kgebetli Moele and Mike Nicol.
We are expecting the 3 day festival to do much to raise awareness about the talented writing happening in South Africa! Expect a report back soon.
Regards
The Open Book Team
Ends
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by Lindsay on May 16th, 2013
French-Congolese author Alain Mabanckou wrote his latest novel, Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, from a child’s perspective of what it was like growing up in the 70s, because he “wanted to explain the way we were living under this Congolese regime called ‘Soviet Socialism’.”
Hadrien Diez from Africa Book Club asked Alain Mabanckou whether “politics necessarily interfere with the experience of being a child in Africa” and he replied by describing listening to the radio with his father every day, saying that he thinks perhaps African children were more aware of politics than children growing up in the Western world. This led Mabanckou to pose his own question, saying that “it raises an important question for the African novel: is it possible to talk about our lives without describing the political situation?”
Mabanckou also discussed his literary influences, his thoughts on writing about Africa as someone who doesn’t live there anymore and the problematic concept of “African literature”:
With nine novels, five collections of poems and a bunch of essays to his name, Franco-Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou is a literary phenomenon in the Francophone world. Renowned for the derisive drollery of his prose but also for his candour when talking about Africa, he has become an important voice of African literature – a subject he now teaches at UCLA. We talked to him on the occasion of the publication in English of his novel “Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty”, in which he evokes with mischievousness and emotion his childhood in Pointe-Noire, the Congolese port city on the Atlantic coast. In this interview with Africa Book Club, Alain Mabanckou speaks about African identity, his eclectic influences and why it is difficult to define an “African literature”.
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by Carolyn on May 15th, 2013
Alert! The shortlist for the Thirteenth Caine Prize for African Writing has just been announced.
This year’s list is devoid of South African entries but includes an unprecedented four Nigerian writers and one from Sierra Leone. It would seem that Rotimi Babatunde, last year’s Nigerian winner, has spurred on his compatriots.
The winner of this year’s £10,000 prize will be announced on 8 July at Bodleian Library, Oxford.
BOOK LIVE sends its congratulations to the shortlistees, as follows:
- Elnathan John (Nigeria) “Bayan Layi” from Per Contra, Issue 25 (USA, 2012)
- Tope Folarin (Nigeria) “Miracle” from Transition, Issue 109 (Bloomington, 2012)
- Pede Hollist (Sierra Leone) “Foreign Aid” from Journal of Progressive Human Services, Vol. 23.3 (Philadelphia, 2012)
- Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria) “The Whispering Trees” from The Whispering Trees, published by Parrésia Publishers (Lagos, 2012)
- Chinelo Okparanta (Nigeria) “America” from Granta, Issue 118 (London, 2012)
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Press release
The shortlist for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing has been announced today (Wednesday 15 May) – and among the five stories chosen are an unprecedented four Nigerian entries.
The Chair of judges, art historian and broadcaster, Gus Casely-Hayford said, “The shortlist was selected from 96 entries from 16 African countries. They are all outstanding African stories that were drawn from an extraordinary body of high quality submissions.”
Gus described the shortlist saying, “The five contrasting titles interrogate aspects of things that we might feel we know of Africa – violence, religion, corruption, family, community – but these are subjects that are deconstructed and beautifully remade. These are challenging, arresting, provocative stories of a continent and its descendants captured at a time of burgeoning change.”
The winner of the £10,000 prize is to be announced at a celebratory dinner at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, on Monday 8 July.
The 2013 shortlist comprises:
- Elnathan John (Nigeria) ‘Bayan Layi’ from Per Contra, Issue 25 (USA, 2012) www.percontra.net
- Tope Folarin (Nigeria) ‘Miracle’ from Transition, Issue 109 (Bloomington, 2012) http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/transition-magazine
- Pede Hollist (Sierra Leone) ‘Foreign Aid’ from Journal of Progressive Human Services, Vol. 23.3 (Philadelphia, 2012) http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wphs20#.UZOV4bVlk_g
- Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria) ‘The Whispering Trees’ from The Whispering Trees, published by Parrésia Publishers (Lagos, 2012) http://www.parresiapublishers.com/
- Chinelo Okparanta (Nigeria) ‘America’ from Granta, Issue 118 (London, 2012) www.granta.com
As always the stories will be available to read online on our website www.caineprize.com and will be published with the 2013 workshop stories in our forthcoming anthology A Memory This Size in July 2013 by New Internationalist and seven co-publishers in Africa.
Alongside Gus on the panel of judges this year are award-winning Nigerian-born artist, Sokari Douglas Camp; author, columnist and Lord Northcliffe Emeritus Professor at UCL, John Sutherland; Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, Nathan Hensley and the winner of the Caine Prize in its inaugural year, Leila Aboulela. Once again, the winner of the £10,000 Caine Prize will be given the opportunity of taking up a month’s residence at Georgetown University, as a Writer-in-Residence at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. The award will cover all travel and living expenses. The winner will also be invited to take part in the Open Book Festival in Cape Town in September 2013.
Last year the Caine Prize was won by Nigerian writer Rotimi Babatunde. He has subsequently co-authored a play Feast for the Young Vic and the Royal Court theatres in London.
Dates for the Diary
This year the shortlisted writers will be reading from their work at the Royal Over-Seas League on Thursday, 4 July at 7pm and at the Southbank Centre, on Sunday, 7 July at 6.30pm. On Friday, 5 July at 2-5pm and Saturday, 6 July at 5pm the shortlisted writers will also take part in the Africa Writes Festival at The British Library, organised by ASAUK and the Royal African Society.
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by Carolyn on May 10th, 2013
Warscapes has shared an extract from The Tuner of Silences, the fifth novel by Mozambican writer Mia Couto to be translated from Portuguese to English, which was released earlier this year.
In this book, David Brookshaw explains in a preface to the excerpt, two worlds clash when Marta, a Portuguese woman comes to Mozambique and arrives at a compound in the bush, which is controlled by Silvestre Vitalício, who calls it “Jezoosalem”.
The story is told by two different narrators: Marta and Mwanito, Silvestre Vitalício’s son, who is taken by his father to live in the compound.
In the piece shared on Warscapes, Mwanito describes growing up in the compound, “a wasteland inhabited only by five men”:
BOOK ONE
I, MWANITO, THE TUNER OF SILENCES
I listen, unaware
Whether what I hear is silence
Or god.
[…]
– Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
I was eleven years old when I saw a woman for the first time, and I was seized by such sudden surprise that I burst into tears. I lived in a wasteland inhabited only by five men. My father had given the place a name. It was called, quite simply, Jezoosalem. It was the land where Jesus would uncrucify himself. And that was the end of the matter, full stop.
My old man, Silvestre Vitalício, explained to us that the world had come to an end and we were the only survivors. Beyond the horizon lay territory devoid of any life, that he referred to vaguely as “Over There.” The entire planet could be summed up in a nutshell like this: stripped of people, with neither roads nor traces of any living creature. In those faraway places, even tormented souls had become extinct.
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by Carolyn on May 9th, 2013
Alert! The Sylt Foundation has announced the five finalists for its African Writer’s Residency Award 2013. Books LIVE members Yewande Omotoso and Chika Unigwe have made the list along with South Africans Ufrieda Ho and and Zinaid Meeran and Ethiopian writer Maaza Mengiste.
The winner of the Award will be granted a two month residency as part of the Sylt Foundation’s multi-disciplinary Residency Programme. The final decision rests with selectors Indra Wussow, Veronique Tadjo and Helon Habila.
The Foundation is based on the island of Sylt, off the coast of Hamburg, Germany. The Foundation has an established residency programme which offers opportunities to South African and international visual artists, writers and photographers. It is managed under the directorship of literary scholar and curator, Wussow.
This African Writer’s Residency Award offers a two month residency to writers of contemporary African literature, who engage with contemporary themes and concerns related to Africa and the African Diaspora. The award is open to published writers of poetry, prose, plays and novels.
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by Maggie Marx on May 8th, 2013
Verdict: stick
In My First Coup D’Etat (Bloomsbury Publishing, London), John Mahama, Ghana’s current president, offers an ambitious account of Africa’s post-independence transformation through the lenses of his personal experiences and those of his native country.
He focuses on the years between the late 1960s and 1980s, a period that has been described as Africa’s “lost decades”, and one that corresponds with the awakening and growth of national consciousness in him. Mahama also writes about African culture and Western influence, about the beauties of the countryside and the joys of family life.
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by Carolyn on May 6th, 2013
The longlist for the first ever Kwani? Manuscript Prize was recently announced, comprising 30 unpublished novel manuscripts, representing 10 African countries. In an article by Tristan McConnell for the London Review of Books blog, the Kwani? Manuscript Prize is presented as an alternative to the Caine Prize, which is administered in Britain.
In the piece, titled “Mzungu Prizes”, Kenyan author Parselelo Kantai expressed his unease at the fact that, “Once the conferring [of the Caine Prize] is done in London you become big on the African landscape”. Billy Kahora, of the Kwani? Trust, is quoted as saying, “I want to give writers opportunities, to have more than the Caine Prize”. Binyavanga Wainaina, 2002 Caine Prize winner, does not deny the importance of the Caine Prize, but adds “it’s always nice to go to England but it’s far from being at the centre of where production, debate and conversation is going on, right?”.
It has to be kept in mind, however, that the Kwani? Manuscript Prize, focusing on full-length novels rather than short stories, has so far only been called a “one-off” prize.
‘Ah, the tyranny of mzungu prizes!’ the Kenyan author and journalist Parselelo Kantai said when I rang him up to talk about literary awards for African writers. Mzungu is Kiswahili for ‘white person’ and Kantai was only half-joking. Since its inception in 2000, the annual Caine Prize for African Writing – awarded, more narrowly than the ‘African Writing’ of its title might imply, ‘to a short story by an African writer published in English’ – has been the most high profile award for contemporary anglophone African writers. But it’s administered in Britain and the £10,000 cash prize is bestowed during a gala dinner at the Bodleian Library. ‘There’s something that rankles,’ says Kantai, who has been shortlisted twice. ‘Once the conferring is done in London you become big on the African landscape.’
Kwani? Manuscript Prize longlist:
The Kwani? Manuscript Project, a new one-off literary prize for unpublished fiction from African writers, is delighted to announce a longlist of 30 titles:
A Night Without Darkness (Nigeria)
Across the Mongolo (Cameroon)
Azanian Bridges (South Africa / UK)
Becoming God (Nigeria)
Born Different (South Africa)
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by Carolyn on Apr 30th, 2013
Alert! Kenyan-born Somali poet Warsan Shire has become the first ever winner of the Brunel University African Poetry Prize, initiated by poet and novelist Bernardine Evaristo. This new prize is aimed at “the development and celebration of poetry from Africa” and open to poets “who have not yet published a full-length poetry collection”.
Warsan, chosen from a shortlist of six, achieved a level of fame after her poem “For Women Who Are Difficult to Love” went viral. She also published a pamphlet of poems called Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth in 2011.
The judges of the Brunel University African Poetry Prize, Sharmilla Beezmohun, Kwame Dawes, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Mpalive Msiska and Evaristo, were impressed by the “combination of substance, urgency, power and drama” in Warsan’s poetry. She will receive prize money of £3,000, funded by Brunel University, Commonwealth Writers and The Africa Centre UK.
Warsan Shire is a 24 year old Kenyan-born Somali poet and writer, based in London. Born in 1988, she has read her work all over Britain as well as in South Africa, Italy, Germany, Canada, North America and Kenya.
Her poetry pamphlet, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, was published in 2011 by flipped eye. Her poems have appeared in Wasafiri, Magma and Poetry Review and in the Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011). They have been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
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by Carolyn on Apr 30th, 2013
Verdict: carrot
All of us have had a dream, a dream that seems to get closer to reality with every step taken. But then once in a while, it stalls, and we lose hope of achieving it; we settle for what we have at that moment…and then out of the blue, comes this golden opportunity- our hopes and dreams are rekindled, we let go of what we have and plunge into the unknown….only to realize we have fallen into a bottomless pit, that seems to push that cherished dream away the further we go….
That is what I thought as I was reading the book Nigerians in Spaceby Deji Olukotun. Released in February 2013 by Ricochet Books, it is the author’s debut novel. The plot spans through USA, Switzerland, Paris, Nigeria and South Africa. It is a tale of murder, crime, shattered dreams, betrayal. The story features three lead characters: Wale, a Nigerian lunar geologist, Thursday Malaysius, an abalone poacher, and Melissa, a girl from Zimbabwe with a skin condition that is as scary as it is fascinating
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by Lindsay on Apr 22nd, 2013
Granta have made a short film about Nadifa Mohamed, one of their Best of Young British Novelists 2013. In the video, Mohamed discusses moving to England from Somalia in 1985 and her first impressions of the country, which included cramped housing, cold weather conditions and going to school for the first time.
The school playground was a hostile place for Mohamed and she says that books offered a safe space for her to retreat into. She speaks about how her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, developed out of conversations she had with her father, who was a sailor. Initially she wrote it down as an account of his life, but then it grew into a novel which incorporated aspects of his stories.
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