Archive for the ‘Nigeria’ Category
by Carolyn on May 8th, 2012
Uitspraak: wortel
Die onlangse wenners in die fiksie-afdeling van die Costa Book Awards (voorheen die Whitbread Literary Awards) is Andrew Miller (in die romanafdeling) met sy sesde roman, Pure, en Christie Watson se Tiny Sunbirds Far Away in die debuutafdeling.
Watson werp haar in Tiny Sunbirds Far Away met oorgawe in die kreatiewe proses.
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by Sophy on May 4th, 2012
Nigerian author Rotimi Babatunde has been shortlisted for the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story “Bombay’s Republic”, published in Vol. 3.9 of the Mirabilia Review. Babatunde is up against Kenya’s Billy Kahora, Malawi’s Stanley Kenani, Zimbabwe’s Melissa Tandiwe Myambo and South Africa’s Constance Myburgh for the £10 000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on 2 July.
While you await the announcement of the award, we invite you to read the shortlisted stories, beginning with “Bombay’s Republic”:
The old jailhouse on the hilltop had remained uninhabited for many decades, through the construction of the town’s first grammar school and the beginning of house-to-house harassment from the affliction called sanitary inspectors, through the laying of the railway tracks by navvies who likewise succeeded in laying pregnancies in the bellies of several lovestruck girls, but fortunes changed for the building with the return of Colour Sergeant Bombay, the veteran who went off with the recruitment officers to Hitler’s War as a man and came back a spotted leopard.
Before Bombay’s departure when everything in the world was locked in its individual box, he could not have believed such metamorphosis was possible. A man was still a man and a leopard a leopard while the old jailhouse was a forsaken place not fit for human habitation. A white man was the District Officer who went by in an impressive white jacket and a black man was the Native Police constable who saluted as the white man passed. This was how the world was and there was no reason to think it could be otherwise. But the war came and the bombs started falling, shattering things out of their imprisonment in boxes and jumbling them without logic into a protean mishmash. Without warning, everything became possible.
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Photo courtesy the Caine Prize for African Writing
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by Sophy on Apr 24th, 2012
Alert! Patrick Flanery and Chibundu Onuzo have been longlisted for the 2012 Desmond Elliott Prize for New Fiction for their novels Absolution and The Spider King’s Daughter respectively. American author Patrick Flanery, who has hit the literary ground running with his portrait of post-apartheid South Africa, will visit Cape Town in September to attend the second Open Book Festival. Nigeria’s Chibundu Onuzo is the youngest author on the longlist and reportedly the youngest woman to be offered a two-book deal with Faber & Faber. She wrote The Spider King’s Daughter at the age of 18.
Flanery and Onuzo are up against eight other debut novelists for the £10 000 award, including David Whitehouse (Bed), SJ Watson (Before I Go To Sleep), Benjamin Wood (The Bellwether Revivals), Will Wiles (Care Of Wooden Floors), Grace McCleen (The Land Of Decoration), Patrick McGuinness (The Last Hundred Days), Jennie Erdal (The Missing Shade of Blue) and Rachel Joyce (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry).
The shortlist will be revealed in May, followed by the announcement of the winner on 28 June at a ceremony in London. Last year’s prize went to Anjali Joseph for Saraswati Park. Best of luck to Flanery and Onuzo!
Press release:
Psychological thrillers, philosophical journeys and coming-of-age stories are amongst the ten debut novels longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize today, Tuesday 24 April 2012. With many of the books focusing on politics and social realism, this longlist reflects a trend in debut fiction of bringing contemporary resonance to some traditional heavyweight themes.
The longlist for The Desmond Elliott Prize 2012 is as follows:
Absolution by Patrick Flanery
Bed by David Whitehouse
Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson
The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood
Care Of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles
The Land Of Decoration by Grace McCleen
The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness
The Missing Shade of Blue by Jennie Erdal
The Spider King’s Daughter by Chibundu Onuzo
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
This year marks the fifth anniversary of the £10,000 award for a first novel published in the UK, set up in memory of the celebrated publisher and literary agent Desmond Elliott to ‘enrich the careers of new writers’. The criteria of the Prize require longlisted novels to display confident and compelling narratives and feature original and arresting characters. This year’s longlist undoubtedly delivers, with a host of memorable protagonists from Mal of David Whitehouse’s tragi-comedy Bed to Judith McPherson, the child protagonist of Grace McCleen’s The Land of Decoration.
Two discernible themes emerge from the 2012 longlist: politically-oriented fiction and campus novels. Three novels are set in political landscapes: Patrick Flanery’s Absolution moves between past and present South Africa under the shadow of Apartheid; Patrick McGuinness’ The Last Hundred Days is set inBucharest in the dying days of communism, whilst Chibundu Onuzo’s The Spider King’s Daughter crosses the divide between rich and poor in Lagos. Closer to home, two of the books explore the world of British academia during the 1980s: Benjamin Wood’s The Bellwether Revivals plays out in the university city of Cambridge, whilst Jennie Erdal’s The Missing Shade of Blue explores the relationship between two donnish misanthropes in Edinburgh.
Also notable are the professions of this year’s longlisted writers. Rachel Joyce is an award-winning playwright and actress. The list includes two academics: Benjamin Wood, currently a lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, and Patrick McGuinness, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a prize-winning poet. Another previously published author is Jennie Erdal, whose 2004 memoir Ghosting exposed her long-serving career as ghostwriter for publisher Naim Attallah. Like the protagonist in The Missing Shade of Blue, Erdal has also worked as a translator. Will Wiles’ career as an architecture and design journalist will no doubt have influenced his novel about a minimalist Eastern European apartment.
Participation in the Faber Academy led to a change of career for former NHS audiologist S.J. Watson, whose debut has already been sold in over 30 languages and has been acquired for film by Ridley Scott’s production company. The youngest of this year’s longlisted authors is Chibundu Onuzo, who was 18 when she wrote The Spider King’s Daughter and is the youngest woman to be offered a two-book deal with Faber and Faber.
This year’s panel of judges is chaired by one of Desmond Elliott’s own protégés, the critically acclaimed author Sam Llewellyn. He is joined by Tom Gatti, Deputy Editor of The Times Review section and Caroline Mileham, Head of Books at Play.com.
A shortlist of three books will be announced in May, followed by a winner announcement on Thursday 28 June at Fortnum & Mason, London.
The 2011 winner was Anjali Joseph for Saraswati Park, published by Fourth Estate. Other winners of the Prize were: The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw (2010); Blackmoor by Edward Hogan (2009) and Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (2008).
Ends
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Images courtesy Desmond Elliott Prize, We Love This Book and Wasafiri
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by Carolyn on Apr 20th, 2012
Verdict: stick
SARAH House is the début novel of Nigerian writer, Ifeanyi Ajaegbo. Written in the first person, it follows the uncertainties and ordeals of protagonist, Nita, who is lured from the village of Opobo and finds herself in Port Harcourt, a victim of human trafficking, condemned to a life of prostitution. Girls targeted in this way fall under the control of brothel managers and their retinues of thugs and are subjected to the personal requirements — sometimes damaging and dangerous – of individual clients. From this world of sleaze — to which eminent politicians, businessmen and the police subscribe— there is little chance of escape. Those who attempt it are brutalised and murdered.
As well as trafficking for prostitution, the gangs deal in the harvesting of organs for illegal export, a gory detail which Nita gradually comprehends as she demystifies the geography of Sarah House, the upmarket brothel to which she is sold after an initial period in a squalid den.
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by Sophy on Apr 19th, 2012
Earlier this week, James Ibori, former governor of Nigeria’s Delta state, was sentenced to 13-years in prison by London’s Southwark Crown Court.
Ibori, an ex-convict consider to be one of the country’s most influential politicians, pleaded guilty to charges of corruption and fraud after the extent of his embezzlement was revealed. In an article for The Guardian, Nigeria’s Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, author of I Do Not Come to You by Chance, comments on the sentencing of Ibori in the context of the pervasive corruption among Nigeria’s political elite.
According to Nwaubani, many Nigerian leaders are guilty of the belief that they are “Somebodys” who are “born to own” and control. While many celebrate Ibori’s sentencing, Nwaubani believes that it changes little as there is “a multitude of latent Iboris temporarily keeping themselves occupied with noisy calls for reform”.
This week, former Nigerian state governor James Ibori was sentenced by a British judge to 13 years in prison. He is guilty on two counts. One is corruption – a crime of which many other Nigerian leaders are guilty. But the second is his belief that some people are “somebodys” who are born to own, control and enjoy while others are “nobodys” whose lot is to serve, toil and endure – a mindset shared by most Nigerians, at every stratum of our society.
Here, the politician can’t accept that “nobodys” like his driver and cobbler are expected to appoint him to the throne. Instead, he seeks the anointing of powerful godfathers, and then arranges to rig the elections. The nurse takes home the bedding donated by charity to the government hospital wards; she knows that the wretched patients are used to sleeping on sheet-less beds in their homes anyway. The newspaper editor would rather make a lead story of the minister’s mother-in-law’s 80th birthday ceremony than of the fact that 400 children died of lead poisoning in Zamfara state. The wealthy madam doesn’t bother that the nannies accompanying her prim children are dressed in rags; she can afford to clothe them nicely, but then, she can also afford to cast pearls on swine. The dead body lies in the street until it bloats and bursts, because no person of worth has reported a missing relative.
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Photo courtesy The Guardian
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by Luso on Apr 19th, 2012
Verdict: carrot
It takes a while to be drawn into this quiet, meditative book, an extended diary of a man’s wanderings across New York. The narrator is Julius, a young Nigerian psychiatrist, who roams the city after hours, lonely and alone, ruminating on his past and the characters he meets. He is a deeply cultured man, making reference to art and literature and the classical music he loves, and so startles us with other details of his life: time spent in a Nigerian military school; his estrangement from his German mother.
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by Sophy on Apr 17th, 2012
By Katarina Hedrén for The Times:
Nigerian writer, art historian, street photographer and tweeter extraordinaire Teju Cole’s first novel tells the story of a man wandering the streets of New York, the commercial hub of the US, and Brussels, Belgium, the heart of the European project. Metropolises where people from around the world cross paths, but rarely meet.
Julius, a Nigerian-German resident psychiatrist in a New York hospital, uses his demanding job as a pretext for embarking on aimless walks. In reality, they are part of a subconscious quest for self-discovery.
Due to his estrangement from his mother he knows little about her side of the family. Expectations of black men and Africans and fragmented childhood memories further contribute to the distortion of self.
Though rooted in a world where knowledge is acquired through scientific methods, Julius gains insight about himself and his obscure past through dreams, his own and others’ memories and seemingly random incidents that encapsulate the post-9/11 existence of this exiled and lonely African soul.
With a prestigious occupation, a few friends and the analytical observer’s ability to make strangers confide in him, Julius only partly qualifies as the outsider that literature loves so much.
During his promenades he walks in and out of meaningful exchanges with friends like the ailing Professor Saito, and patients like the depressed Professor V, whose research is exacerbating her condition.
Yet others are chance meetings with strangers like Farouq, a frustrated scholar and internet café employee in Brussels, and the Haitian shoe-shiner who devoted most of his life to his own liberation. Julius’s present is as compartmentalised and scattered as his past, and when one of his few confidants is gone, no one can vouch for Julius’s status as his friend.
Cole recounts Julius’s quest in a detailed and contained fashion which has the advantage of perfectly reflecting the mind of a young, ambitious and emotionally numbed academic, and the disadvantage of being factual and information-laden to the point of boring the reader at times.
Cole masterfully depicts utter solitude and despair without spelling out what is better implied through light gestures and subtly charged situations, and through carefully measured emphasis and omissions. In what at first might appear as a detached approach, the author weaves small enthralling narratives in the form of conversations, encounters, memories and observations into a complete and sad story of a densely populated, disjointed world. A universe where lonely strangers struggle to carve out an existence irrespective of perceptions of who they are and their place in it – a struggle that easily makes the vulnerable ones underestimate their impact on the lives of fellow human beings.
Julius’s is a world inhabited by individuals and individualists unable to connect for longer than brief moments, and one in which the only thing we know for sure is that we can escape everything but death, our past actions and bedbugs.
- Open City is published by Faber & Faber and now available in paperback
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by Sophy on Apr 13th, 2012
Efioanwan Edem invites you to read three chapters from his upcoming novel, Broken Portraits: Jonathan’s Chronicles. Set between Nigeria and South Africa, Broken Portraits chronicles the lives of two young Nigerian men who grapple with love and loneliness.
Read chapters eight, nine and ten on HarperCollins’ writing community site, Authonomy:
“Where on God’s green earth have you been?” Bengy asked by way of greeting when I got in late Sunday night. He burrowed himself out of the mess of cardboard paper and came to a halt in front of me. Our apartment’s near-empty living room had been turned into a temporary designing studio; Bengy was doubling as the graphic artist and costumes designer and he had a small creative staff working with him most of the day. I averted my eyes. It was an awkward situation I had put myself in. I had never had to keep any secrets from my best friend before. Yet, I knew I could not allow anyone, not even Bengy, a glimpse of my escapades that weekend.
“Ol’ boy, how far? Oh, wow that’s a good one,” I said referring to the charcoal outline Bengy had spread on the floor.
“Do you like it then?” Bengy asked uncertainly.
“Do I like it!” I bellowed.
It was a sketch of the famous balcony scene. There was Juliet, clad in sixteenth century garb, staring dreamily out of a window, and Romeo down in a garden, dressed in a three-piece suit and tie. The whole queer mix of the old and new fad was a perfect depiction of our twenty-first century remaking of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It would make a good poster.
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by Sophy on Apr 13th, 2012
Verdict: carrots!
When the parents of 12-year-old Nigerian, Blessing, break up, she leaves electricity and running water behind to move back to her mother’s family in a rural compound village.
At first, she finds it hard to adapt to the new simple lifestyle of her grandparents, but soon she becomes the apprentice midwife assisting her grandmother and everything changes.
I have been recommending this book as “The Kite Runner for Nigeria”, as it does what that book – and all good fiction – does, it opens your eyes to a world you may not have had much interest in or knowledge of. After reading The Kite Runner we understood more about Afghanistan and the news headlines began to make sense. After reading Tiny Sunbirds, the same is true for Nigeria.
Twelve-year-old Blessing and her older brother, the asthmatic and scholarly Ezekiel, live with their parents in the upmarket Better Life Executive Homes in Lagos. But when their father abandons them for another woman, they are forced to move to their mother’s village in the Niger Delta. The extended family is poor, living in a compound with no electricity or running water, but they make up for it in resourcefulness, ambition and old-fashioned unconditional love. And not a little humour.
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by Sophy on Apr 12th, 2012
In September this year, Penguin Books will publish There Was A Country, the brand new book by Chinua Achebe. Born in 1930, Albert Chinualumogu (Chinua) Achebe achieved renown for his debut novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart, which has been translated into more than 50 languages.
Subtitled “A Personal History of Biafra”, There Was A Country centres on Achebe’s personal experience of the Nigerian Civil War, in many ways the defining event of his life. Its release, according to Newstime Africa‘s Dennis Kabatto, is “arguably the most anticipated [of] this millennium”:
There is no doubt, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe upcoming memoir There Was a Country, A Personal History of Biafra is arguably the most anticipated book launch in this millennium. There Was A Country, A Personal History of Biafra is published by Penguin and is set to be released on September 6, 2012. In this novel, Professor Achebe reckons with one of Africa’s fateful event the Nigerian-Biafran war, which began on July 6, 1967 and ended on January 1970 – an attempted secession of Nigeria’s southeastern province as the self-proclaimed Republic of Biafra.
Penguin books synopsis describes There Was a Country as “marrying history and memoir, poetry and prose, a distillation of vivid firsthand observation and forty years of research and reflection. Wise, humane and authoritative, it will stand as definitive and reinforce Achebe’s place as one of the most vital literary and moral voices of our age.”
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Photo courtesy The London Nigerian
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