Alert! Who’s heard of Yaba Badoe?
Not too many people, in South Africa at least.
But the British-Ghanaian writer is set to change that with a personal appearance in Johannesburg, where she and Jassy Mackenzie will be in conversation about Badoe’s first novel, a krimi called True Murder.
Here’s the blurb:
Eleven year old Ajuba has been abandoned at a Devon boarding school by her Ghanaian father. Haunted by the circumstances of her mother’s breakdown and the ghosts of the life she left behind in Ghana, she falls under the spell of new girl Polly Venus and her chaotic, glamorous family. But all is not what it might seem in the Venus household.
And here’s a glowing review in the UK’s Independent:
The fictitious magazine that gives Yaba Badoe’s perceptive first novel its name is something of a hybrid – a synthesis of the American pulp magazines, and the crime comic-books that grew out of this earlier format and whipped up even more of a furore as the target audience was perceived to be children.
You can watch a video of Badoe at TheInterviewOnline – and watch her live in person on Thursday 19 Nov in Joburg:
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November 13th, 2009 @16:47 #
Yaba's quite well-known in local feminist and academic circles, notably for a brilliant piece she wrote on a "witch sanctuary" in northern Ghana for the journal Feminist Africa http://www.feministafrica.org/uploads/File/Issue%205/FA5_feature_article_2.pdf (published out of UCT's African Gender Institute). In the UK and at home in Ghana, she's best known as a documentary film-maker, journalist and writer. She has an powerful and charismatic presence, she's funny and feisty, and she and Jassy are going to make a dynamite team -- don't miss this. A quick look at Google shows more than a dozen carrots for True Murder, which must be pretty exceptional: Yaba has sent me THREE copies from London, and every single one of them has been, ahem, intercepted along the way.