Alert! Cameroonian novelist Léonora Miano – lately in South Africa at the Time of the Writer – is not happy with her US publishers, Bison Books, aka The University of Nebraska Press. Seems the press has tacked a foreword on to its translation of Miano’s L’Interieur de la nuit (Dark Heart of the Night) without first consulting the author. The Guardian’s Richard Lea picks up the story:
I’ve heard of novelists disagreeing with their reviewers, but this is something else entirely. “Cameroon does not have the worse human rights record in Africa … Cameroon is not the setting of the novel … I did not leave Cameroon to France to flee from a violent place … My novel is not a criticism of Negritude or Panafricanism … I’ve not just written another novel. Three more have actually been published …” It beggars belief that Miano didn’t get a look at this before it was stuck on the front of her book – now she’s asking for the foreword to be withdrawn.
Here’s Miano’s letter to the Complete Review on the offending foreword, which first drew Lea’s attention:
But now, UN Press also felt entitled to add a foreword. Why not, if the aim was to help the readers know the writer and understand the novel? The problem is that the foreword is full of misleading information. Let’s say it frankly, it’s full of lies:
[...]
Cameroon is not the setting of the novel which was, as I’ve said it many times, inspired by a documentary that I saw on children at war. We don’t have those in Cameroon nowadays, and if we ever had, I never heard about it.
Alert! The longlist for the £30 000-plus-a-statue-named-Bessie Orange Prize for fiction, the UK’s (world’s?) premiere women-writers-only literary award, has been announced.
When I first saw it, my bleary eyes deceived me into thinking that there were no African longlistees. Two rapid-fire tweets from @BOOKSA friend @urbanrenewal quickly put me to rights, however (click here and here). There are in fact at least two writers of African provenance on the list: Nadifa Mohamed, who was born in Somalia and Laila Lalami (@lailalalami), who was born in Morocco. Lalami is currently listed as living in Los Angeles; while Mohamed apparently lives in the UK.
Here are the blurbs for their longlisted books:
Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed
A stunning novel set in 1930s Somalia spanning a decade of war and upheaval, all seen through the eyes of a small boy alone in the world. Aden,1935; a city vibrant, alive, and full of hidden dangers. And home to Jama, a ten year-old boy. But then his mother dies unexpectedly and he finds himself alone in the world. Jama is forced home to his native Somalia, the land of his nomadic ancestors. War is on the horizon and the fascist Italian forces who control parts of east Africa are preparing for battle. Yet Jama cannot rest until he discovers whether his father, who has been absent from his life since he was a baby, is alive somewhere. And so begins an epic journey which will take Jama north through Djibouti, war-torn Eritrea and Sudan, to Egypt. And from there, aboard a ship transporting Jewish refugees just released from German concentration camp, across the seas to Britain and freedom. This story of one boy’s long walk to freedom is also the story of how the Second World War affected Africa and its people. A story of displacement and family.
Secret Son by Laila Lalami
When a young man is given the chance to rewrite his future, he doesn’t realize the price he will pay for giving up his past…Casablanca’s stinking alleys are the only home that nineteen-year-old Youssef El-Mekki has ever known. Raised by his mother in a one-room home, the film stars flickering on the local cinema’s screen offer the only glimmer of hope to his frustrated dreams of escape. Until, that is, the father he thought dead turns out to be very much alive. A high profile businessman with wealth to burn, Nabil is disenchanted with his daughter and eager to take in the boy he never knew. Soon Youssef is installed in his penthouse and sampling the gold-plated luxuries enjoyed by Casablanca’s elite. But as he leaves the slums of his childhood behind him, he comes up against a starkly un-glittering reality…
The Mail & Guardian’s chief African lit correspondent weaves VS Naipaul into this terrific profile of French-Ivorian author Tadjo, who teaches at Wits University, and has a new novel coming out in May:
But it’s as a writer rather than as a teacher that Tadjo has found fame. In the past few years Tadjo’s The Blind Kingdom, Queen Pokou and As the Crow Flies — all books originally written in French — have become available to English-speaking readers.
The Blind Kingdom is about a dark, dysfunctional state, which appropriately uses the symbol of the bat. This state, unlike the blind nocturnal mammal, is ramming its head in self-destruct mode into walls and high-rise buildings.
Queen Pokou, winner of the 2005 Grand Prix Litteraire D’Afrique Noire (the premier prize in Francophone African literature), is a beautiful retelling of the founding myths of the Baoule people of Côte d’Ivoire.
It is the story of Abraha Pokou, an 18th-century Ashanti woman, fleeing royal intrigue and murder at the Ashanti court. Pokou and her followers flee, with the royal Ashanti army in pursuit, and come to the great Comoe River. An oracle tells them that to cross, they have to sacrifice a royal child to the river spirits.
Alert! BOOK SA is not entirely convinced of the genuineness of the call, but Granta magazine is apparently looking for help compiling the top African short stories of the past 50 years. The following notice has been found poking out of various online literary thickets:
The Granta Book of The African Short Story
Edited by Helon Habila and Binyavanga Wainaina
This anthology will bring together the best of the best African short stories published in the last 50 years. You are invited to recommend any great short story you have read in a collection, a magazine, online, or heard on the radio, but it has to be by an African author.
The story could be in English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, or any major African language, but the final language of publication will be English. Send story title, author’s name, and any publication information you have to help us track your recommended story. Send before April 30, 2010, to: africastories2010@gmail.com
Is it real? BOOK SA will be calling Granta later on to find out. Even if not, however, the exercise of considering Africa’s top shorts might be worthwhile. From South Africa, off the top of my head, I’d recommend Siphiwo Mahala’s “The Suit Continued” and Ivan Vladislavic’s “The WHITES ONLY Bench” as strong contenders.
Hello Nigeria! has been the sense on the ground since word broke of Arts and Culture Minister Lulu Xingwana’s dismissal of a photography exhibition at Constitution Hill as “pornographic” and “immoral”.
Xingwana’s disingenuous response inspires little optimism. She claims, “I was not even aware as to whether the ‘bodies’ in the images were of men or women”. Oh, sister, did they pluck out your eyes? Are you also the victim of hate crimes? What will it take for you to look?
Special to BOOK SA, Yvette Christiansë, poet and novelist, unpacks the Minister’s recent utterances, pondering the meaning of the Xingwana’s stance for practitioners of the written word – particularly those in the LGBTI community:
**
One name came to mind as I read the article in The Times: Eudy Simelane.
For a government minister to accuse women who love women of being destructive to nation building is dangerous discrimination. Discriminatus: to be in a state of separation. Set apart…Need I say more?
And I seem to recall the only too recent linking of intimacy with immorality and nationalism. Will the Minister strike a special squad? Why, it could be called the Immorality Squad.
Perhaps a key procedural question is: Can a government minister be so cavalier about a nation’s hard won Constitution? Surely such cavalier disregard is unconstitutional, which is to say dismissive of the foundation of rule and law that is a nation’s highest aspiration. A Constitution is, or we hope it is, where the idea of nation resides and is imagined, in the articles of law that protect us all from each other and even from ourselves (as when we are moved by any unexamined discriminatory impulse). Is there not an oath that a minister swears?
Can a government minister, a leader of an elected government, elected according to the provisions of a Constitution, be dismissive of her/his Constitution? If the answer is yes then everyone, but everyone, must be afraid. If the answer is no, we are talking about unconstitutional declarations.
Pornographic? How quickly that word came up. And how revealing. Perhaps the meaning of pornography that comes immediately to mind is that which refers to the explicit display of sexual subjects to explicitly arouse the viewer sexually, and for the personal gain of the pornographer. This is clearly not the case in these photographs. They are moving, yes, in very, very different ways from what the Minister clearly thought.
This is a very touchy subject, but one issue about pornography is the way that it renders feminine and feminized subjects as the passive, mindless players in a script that cares nothing for them as people. Zaneli Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo produce caring, respectful, mindful images that are critically aesthetic. I don’t have to rehearse a long history of portrayals of bodies that have nothing to do with pornography even if they show the erotic (the erotic is not divorced from the aesthetic in the portraits I am thinking of, and that is why they are not reductive and pornographic).
Porno: from prostitute. Graphos: to write. To depict (only) the body vacated of all interiority that is not relevant to sex.
The images that Muholi and Mntambo create are explicitly caring of their subjects. They show love. And sexuality. Not simply sex. There is a difference. With due respect to the Minister, to reduce someone to sexual object alone is to misread.
While we are all invited to be viewers, as the artist is herself, not all viewers see pornographically. The risk that the artist and her subjects take is that she and they cannot predict or control the fact that some viewers only see women’s bodies as displayed for pleasure no matter what the artistic intent is, or that some viewers would only see the erotic and not the aesthetic.
Discrimination is pornographic in the extended usage of the term. The extended meaning pornography that is so often overlooked is the pornography of violence. Discrimination is violence because, outspoken, it has a purpose. Its purpose is to illicit or stimulate reaction and further discrimination. In the Minister’s case, such outspoken statements are clearly able to ’stimulate’ action even at a bureaucratic level as, according to The Times, some of the Minister’s remarks imply.
The Times reported the Minister as demanding to know why the exhibition “was not censored and why her department had contributed R300,000 to it” (let all of the participants be warned-there is no freedom of association, they are all implicated and that is the real unraveling power of discrimination; it cannot stop at one group, it can only begin to look at anyone associated with that group). Discrimination is pornographic because it incites social, political, unconstitutional violence.
And in a context in which homophobia has already targeted women who love women, the Minister’s statements are not simply unfortunate. They are downright dangerous. I say this name here and we should all inhale and have a moment’s silence: Eudy Simelane.
South Africa is preparing for the World Cup Soccer. Whether one is a fan of soccer or not, or a sports minded person or not, soccer has been described (by Achille Mbembe for one) as a sport that cuts across race, class, ethnic and, to some extent, gender boundaries. Bafana Bafana is hailed as a team that brings positive attention to South Africa.
Eudy Simelane’s team, Banyana Banyana, has represented South Africa internationally and South Africans were very happy to cheer them on and send them off under the flag. They play as South Africans, members of the nation that their parents worked to bring into being, and that they are proud to represent. Eudy Simelane played as a South African, as someone who helped bring positive attention to the nation in Cyprus, in Holland and they have their eye set on Germany 2011.
A visit to Banyana Banyana’s facebook shows such statements as “Go play with pride for our motherland” and “do us proud” or “go make South Africa proud and lets do our best.” This is the language of inclusion. It is exactly the expression of “social cohesion and nation building.” Or is this not the kind of social cohesion and nation building that the Minister envisages?
Let me stress that I am not suggesting that all of the women in Banyana Banyana love as Eudy Simelane did. I was drawing attention to her participation in this team’s achievements, which, for the team’s considerable fan base, reflect positively upon the nation. And I was drawing attention to the fact that her team members accepted and valued her for the fully rounded, fully contributing person that she was.
But, in truth, it should not be necessary to marshal Eudy Simelane’s role in Banyana Banyana’s achievements as evidence in order to counter the implication that someone like her could/should be discriminated against or singled out as being an improper citizen or, worse, be accused of being a presence that threatens social and national cohesion.
If this were true, there could be no single nation existing on the face of this planet because gays and lesbians are a fact. We are here. We contribute. We believe. We serve our communities, our nations. We love each other. We love in complex ways. We love with all our hearts and minds, with our bodies. We pay the price for love. We cannot, ever, take our love for granted. And we therefore are very, very mindful and careful about squander. Love can never be squandered. Never. The squandering of love is hateful because hate fills the place where love should be.
It might not be the Minister’s intention to incite violence, but the cold and deadly fact is that her statements would be welcome among those who seek to justify their violence. They already believe themselves sanctioned by all the hoary, spurious biology about gays and lesbians.
I am tired of being scapegoated. But my weariness is a privileged, lucky distance from what happened to Eudy Simelane. It is a distance that should not be a privilege or luck. It should be the right it is. A Constitution says that. And the Minister is sworn to uphold the Constitution. A Minister is sworn to put into practice the ideals that have liberated a country and leave them to be dead letters of law.
Why am I still being so over polite about this business? Is the Minister ashamed of South Africa’s Constitution? Shame on the Minister. Shame.
**
In a second piece special to BOOK SA, poet and academic Gabeba Baderoon writes “On Looking and Not Looking”, an open letter responding to the Minister’s comments about the Innovative Women Exhibition:
**
On Looking and Not Looking by Gabeba Baderoon
Dear Minister Xingwana,
To place yourself before a work of art is a complex and potentially transformative experience. Sometimes that means looking at something you’d rather not see. But as the Minister of Arts and Culture, you preside over a realm in which that line between what you’d rather not see and what you need to look at is an ever-present factor, and a theme of much art.
Minister, I invite you to look at art that challenges you, like that of Nandipha Mntambo and Zanele Muholi. That looking is an active and complicated experience that includes all the discomfort, shock, unsettling of established notions, new ideas and feelings that you appear to have had at the Innovative Women exhibition, and that together can amount to illumination. That is what art does. The problem with walking out of an exhibition is that you miss the many meanings that the works evoke, both separately and together. You miss what they create and unsettle, and therefore the possibility of transformation.
Immoral, offensive and going against nation-building … there were children as young as three years old in the room … where do we draw the line between art and pornography.
Minister, where does this language come from?
When you turn to such justifications for your actions, it is our duty as artists, writers, feminists and citizens to point out how revealingly close your words are to those of the apartheid censors.
Artists and governments have always had a contentious relationship. Artists can reach into the minds of people and change them. That is a power that states are wary of and want to regulate. But to constrict art is to erase the capacity for imagining what does not yet exist. We need that capacity because our world is imperfect and we need brilliant, epiphanic initiatives if we are to succeed in changing it. Art generates epiphanies.
So let us name what happened in that brief glance, that instantaneous assessment, that abrupt walking out, and the explanations from your office that followed. Let us name it and its dangers.
The name is censorship, and the dangers are reactionary ideas about art and the fueling of homophobia.
Fortunately, there is another language for thinking about art and artists.
Minister, what would you have seen if you had stayed and viewed the works of Nandipha Mntambo and Zanele Muholi alongside all the other artists in the Innovative Women exhibition and talked about them with other visitors? You would have seen works that use the language of allusion, intimacy, beauty and pleasure.
During your brief glance, you may have mistaken the intimacy in Muholi’s images for pornography and the erudite allusions in Mntambo’s work for carelessness about sexual violence, but that mistake can only be sustained if you don’t truly look at their art. If you stood in front of Muholi’s photographs, you would see lesbian lives outside of the narratives of violation and pornography through which they are more commonly presented to us. You would see how her work opens up a discussion about visibility itself.
For lesbians, visibility carries an immense cost – the feminist writer Pumla Gqola calls this a “hyper-visibility” that has been used to violate lesbian lives through a sensationalistic focus on suffering that has simultaneously made it possible to ignore that suffering. Muholi’s images confront such hyper-visibility and reclaim a space for the women in her photographs away from denigration and hostility and toward presence, pleasure and wholeness. Her work show us there is no category of human being whom it is safe to despise and whose hurt it is expedient to ignore.
And once the photos existed and came into public view, other good followed. Some of the best new South African writing on art, citizenship and belonging has been sparked by Muholi’s work, including essays by Desiree Lewis, Pumla Gqola and Gabi Ngcobo. You might be pleased to know, Minister, that this new direction has also been traced by a vanguard of the African continent’s finest feminist scholars, among them Sylvia Tamale, Patricia McFadden and Charmaine Pereira.
No artist is afraid of being a dissident to conventional thinking. That is their role. Mntambo, Muholi and other artists continuously spark our creative, ethical and political responses, but also our personal and affective ones. We envisage ourselves anew after their art enters our imaginations. If we see someone’s wholeness, can we continue to ignore their violation? The most radical possibility of art is to generate change – and in the process create a more inclusive notion of community.
Minister, perhaps unintentionally, your words have generated a great deal of alarm in the world of the arts and among those of us who strongly support the rights of gays and lesbians. We wonder if we are entering “our George Bush years,” as Gender Commissioner Yvette Abrahams asserted on hearing your comments.
I would like to imagine a different possibility, Minister. I want to imagine you will come back to the images you walked away from, and look deeply at what you thought you didn’t want to see. I imagine you rethinking received ideas about art and pornography (the great poet and activist Audre Lorde gives us some beautifully nuanced insights on this) and arriving at a hard-earned transformation.
I think of you reflecting on your responsibilities as the guardian of the nation’s best impulses in art and culture – which is not to limit but to enable such work. Then perhaps this experience of looking again at the thing you didn’t want to see will have brought you closer to the best and most expansive possibilities of art.
**
Should you feel disconsolate, dear reader, don’t do what I did. Avoid the comments from Joe Public on these articles, lest you find yourself compelled to vomit with grief.
We must ask once again: Minister, where does this language come from? Where indeed?
Alert!SA PEN has issued its call for entries for the £10 000 2011 PEN/Studzinsky Literary Awards – which are judged by JM Coetzee – and has announced that Margie Orford is set to replace Shaun Johnson on the PEN executive.
In a not-altogether-welcome shift of policy, SA PEN has reverted to the geographical scope of its award that was in place before it secured sponsorship from current benefactor John Studzinski. That is, only residents of SADC’s fifteen countries may enter, whereas the inaugural award was open to the whole of Africa. (See the press release below for the full list of eligible countries.) Happily, the lack of any age restriction on entrants appears to remain intact.
3 000 to 5 000 word short fiction entries in English are invited from 1 March 2010; submission details will be posted to the SA PEN website on that date; no final closing deadline appears to have yet been set.
Here’s the complete press release from SA PEN:
2011 PEN/STUDZINSKI LITERARY AWARDS
Entries invited from 1 March 2010
The South African Centre of International PEN (SA PEN) is pleased to announce the launch of the second in the series of PEN/STUDZINSKI Literary Awards.
Entries for the award for original short stories in English are called for from 1 March 2010 and AFRICAN PENS, a compilation of the short-listed stories, will be published in mid-2011.
Prizes totalling £10 000 will once again be donated by American philanthropist and global investment banker, John Studzinski. The first, second and third prizes will be £5 000, £3 000 and £2 000, respectively.
Nobel Laureate and SA PEN Honorary Member, J.M. Coetzee, will once again select the winning entries.
The 2011 PEN/STUDZINSKI Literary Award aims to encourage creative writing in southern Africa and will offer talented writers an exciting opportunity to launch or develop a literary career. Twelve contributors to our earlier HSBC/SA PEN series have now published their own books, including Ceridwen Dovey who won the 2008 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Petina Gappah, an early winner, went on to sign a three-book contract with Faber & Faber in the UK and Farrar Strauss & Giroux in the US. Three of the five short-listed stories for the Caine prize for African Writing first appeared in AFRICAN PENS 2007 – the model for AFRICAN PENS 2011. The story POISON, set in a threatened Cape Town, and written by author Henrietta Rose-Innes, was chosen by J.M, Coetzee as the winner of the 2007 HSBC/SA PEN Literary Award and it went on to win the 2008 Caine Prize of £10 000.
Our 2009 project, led by author Shaun Johnson, received over 800 entries from writers throughout Africa, but this year we revert to appealing only to writers living in the fifteen countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC*). The genre is still the short-story, this time between 3 000 and 5 000 words.
SA PEN is pleased to announce that author Margie Orford has agreed to take Shaun’s place on the SA PEN executive and that the Editorial Board for the 2011 award will comprise:
Anthony Fleischer (Chairman), novelist and President of SA PEN Dianne Case, popular children’s author John Gardener, English teacher, retired Head of Kingswood College & Bishops, published numerous articles and Bishops’ 150 year history of the school Jeremy Lawrence, writer who has worked in journalism and publishing in London and South Africa Adré Marshall, retired academic, author of book on Henry James and sundry poems, translator (French/English) Peter Merrington, novelist, professor extraordinaire at the University of the Western Cape, ceramicist and motorcyclist Margie Orford, writer and sometime journalist Anne Schuster, novelist, poet, creative writing facilitator and publisher J.M. Coetzee – Nobel Laureate (Final judge)
Writers who are citizens of SADC countries* are encouraged to prepare short stories for submission. Further information and detailed rules of entry will be posted on the SA PEN website, www.sapen.co.za, from the 1 March 2010. Previous publications featuring the shortlisted and winning stories from the 2005, 2006 and 2007 HSBC/SA PEN, and 2009 PEN/STUDZINSKI Literary Awards are: AFRICAN COMPASS (2005, New Africa Books), AFRICAN ROAD (2006, New Africa Books), AFRICAN PENS (2007, New Africa Books), NEW WRITING FROM AFRICA 2009 (2009, Johnson & KingJames Books).
* SADC countries: Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
In 2005 a friend showed up at Michela Wrong’s door with an incredible tale. It contained everything needed for a exposé: drama, corruption, greed, threats and deceit. The friend was John Githongo, the anti-corruption activist hired as Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics in Kenya.
When John turned up, I was actually writing another book. I was annoyed because it interrupted my concentration, but after awhile, I realized that this was a very interesting personal story, which could tell a bigger story about Kenya, corruption, and the experiences I had had covering Kenya through two elections. Originally, I thought John would write his own book and that’s why I didn’t offer for a long time. Eventually, he concluded that he was too close to it, that he needed an outsider to do it, and he gave this project his blessing.
FPD: Why was John Githongo considered to be the right person for this job?
I don’t think the people who appointed him really thought it through. Their reaction was very instinctive, redolent of Kenya in many ways and the whole system. His father was the accountant for many leading Kikuyus and was part of the old boy network. John was someone they had known as a child, he had gone to school with their sons. He came from the right ethnic community. They thought, “Here’s this bright young man who we’ve known all our lives, he’s got all the right credentials, he’s squeaky clean, and he presents a great face to the outside world. We know he’s one of us.” The Kikuyu elite, some of whom had been energetic anticorruption campaigners, had come to associate corruption so strongly with former President Moi and Kalenjin business interests. The appointment was probably made in good faith, but I don’t think it occurred to them that this was bound to become a tricky issue for them as well. They didn’t sit down when they were in opposition and imagine what it would be like if they had state resources at their command, how they would behave themselves, and control those urges when they came to power. It’s a lack of imagination, really.
Alert! Almost a year before the announcement of the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize shortlists, StoryTime Africa published an excerpt from Ghanaian Ayesha H Atta’s Harmattan Rain, which is now up for Best First Book – Africa Region.
Here’s the excerpt, “Khaya Tree”:
March 1954
On the day after the first rainfall of the year, Lizzie-Achiaa stood under a neem tree in front of her father’s compound, a convinced young woman.
She was convinced that there was more to life than working on Papa Yaw’s unproductive farm, helping Mama Efua with chores and having inane conversations with Asantewa.
Times were hard in Adukrom No. 2. Owusua, her eldest sister had died the year before. Swollen shoot disease had infected plants. Her father’s cocoa farm had been no exception, and of course, he was quick to use that in his defense of trying to marry her off. But she was convinced life would get better and she didn’t have to marry someone she didn’t love.
She stared at the neem leaves, resplendent after their wash. She was convinced that outside Adukrom No. 2, there were interesting people and she had proof—her tall enigma from the north, Bador Samed.
Before any friendship had developed with Bador, however, she’d regarded him just as everyone in the village had — with mistrust. He’d showed up early one Saturday morning and stayed on for two years as the medicine man’s assistant. She welcomed his friendship when everyone in her house was mourning Owusua and wouldn’t give her the time of day. Their conversations were the perfect escape from a house where death had left its stubborn mark. He would be sending for her any minute. She waited impatiently.
Alert! The Commonwealth Foundation has released the shortlists for its annual Commonwealth Writers’ Prize – a worldwide literary sweepstakes that sees writers of fiction in four regions (Africa, the Caribbean and Canada, South Asia and Europe, and South East Asia and the Pacific) compete first for regional awards and finally for top honours amongst the regional winners at a different literary festival each year. (2008’s finals were held at the Franschhoek Literary Festival.)
While the rest of the continent didn’t quite break South Africa’s stranglehold on the Africa region shortlists, SA Lit is slightly less rampant than in 2009, when only one book from outside our country made either list (that being Akpan’s). Nigeria is well-represented this year with four titles among the fourteen shortlistees, while Ghana also gets a look in with Ayesha Harunna Attah’s Harmattan Rain. That still leaves the continent’s literary powerhouse with fully nine of the fourteen shortlisted titles – and one suspects that the lists might have been lengthened to seven titles each to accommodate more continental diversity.
Among the SA books, it’s interesting to note that not all originate from SA publishers: Gill Schierhout’s The Shape of Him is a Jonathan Cape title, while Come Sunday by Isla Morley is out from Sceptre. Then there’s Mark Behr’s Kings of the Water, which, although out from Penguin, was first published in the US. Is SA Lit experiencing the same “diaspora” phenomenon as writing from Nigeria? None of the non-SA authors on the lists, meanwhile, actually live in Africa. What does this say about the state of African letters, or, alternatively, the editorial process behind the picking of the shortlistees?
BOOK SA members Dawn Garisch, Rosemund Handler, Andrew Brown, Alistair Morgan and Erica Emdon feature on this year’s shortlists. Penguin, meanwhile, scored highest among local publishers, with four of its titles getting the nod. Here are the complete lists, without further ado:
Book details: 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize Shortlist – Best Book, Africa Region
The Caine Prize for African Writing has just announced its judging panel for the 2010 prize – for which entries closed on the 31st of last month. A shortlist will be announced sometime in April.
Press release
The judges of this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing were announced today. The panel will be chaired by The Economist’s Literary Editor Fiammetta Rocco, and joining her are Granta deputy editor Ellah Allfrey, Professor Jon Cook of the University of East Anglia, award-winning novelist Hisham Matar and Georgetown University professor Samantha Pinto.
This year 115 qualifying stories have been submitted to the judges from 13 African countries. The judges will meet in April to decide on the shortlisted stories, which will be announced shortly thereafter. The winning story will be announced at a dinner at the Bodleian Library in Oxford on Monday 5 July.
Last year the Caine Prize, described as Africa’s leading literary award, was won by Nigerian writer EC Osondu. [Click here for coverage of Osondu's win.] Chair of judges Nana Yaa Mensah said at the time “a tour de force describing, from a child’s point of view, the dislocating experience of being a displaced person. It is powerfully written with not an ounce of fat on it – and deeply moving.”
Work in Progress and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2009 by The Caine Prize For African Writing Book homepage EAN: 9781770097506 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Alert! Cameroonian novelist Léonora Miano – lately in South Africa at the Time of the Writer – is not happy with her US publishers, Bison Books, aka The University of Nebraska Press. Seems the press has tacked a foreword on to its translation of Miano’s L’Interieur de la nuit (Dark Heart of the Night) without first consulting the author. The Guardian’s Richard Lea picks up the story:
