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
Stephen Watson presents us with a meditation on the replenishing power of walking through fynbos above sparkling seas…
AS WITH many a passion, one’s earliest beginnings, as well as the place of those beginnings, are implicated.
When the door of my family home first opened and my toddler self stepped through it, it was the good fortune of my life to enter a domain which was not only that of the dismal precinct of Bergvliet, Cape Town, circa 1960 – suburb of economical housing for servicemen returned from World War 2 its soil all sand, all but tree-less.
The world at my door was also that of the Table Mountain chain, that 60km long spine of mountains, misshapen with peaks, bisected by valleys, lining the Cape Peninsula.
It was adjacent to its immense otherness – the otherness of geology that my childhood was to pass. In fact, you had only to cross the street, ford a wetland, then a stretch of forest, to emerge high on the slopes of Constantiaberg.
In India she is known as an an author, socialite, celebrity, former beauty queen and model, columnist, designer and pen behind a number of popular television serials. A mouthful indeed.
Shobhaa is also a role model to many young Indian women.
Born Shobhaa Rajadhyaksha on January 7, 1947, in Maharshtra, Dé went on to graduate from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, with a degree in psychology. After finishing college, this disarmingly beautiful woman, who also sports a tattoo on her bicep, made a name for herself as a model.
Kalk Bay Books‘ Ann Donald defends her own in a response to Shaun de Waal’s stick for Exclusive Books, which laments the state of SA bookstores’ stocking habits and literary nous:
A couple of weeks ago a damning blog was posted on Thought Leader, which among other complaints, criticised the ineptitude of sales staff at a chain bookstore.
“‘I am aware,” the blogger wrote, “that bookshops and other retailers, in the interests of paying their exorbitant rents, need to be able to employ assistants with very little training or knowledge. Usually they are varsity students who are probably struggling, at that very moment, to get through Pride and Prejudice.
“But,” he continued, “it might be a good idea for a bookseller to employ people who are at least vaguely literate, perhaps even keen on books and literature and with some basic knowledge of the field. You used to be able to speak to a shop manager with a palpably deep love of books, with enthusiasms of his or her own, with passions and ideas …”
Mgqolozana deserves special mention, as he is the only SA author to appear twice, featuring on the lists of major literary personages Nadine Gordimer and Zakes Mda.
Last, thanks to Coovadia for finding the space to mention BOOK SA (and the Book Lounge) – we’re blushing!
From Albie Sachs and Thando Mgqolozana to Wells Tower and some lesser-known talents, the Sunday Independent’s reviewers and a handful of writers offer up the fruits of their readings
Michiel Heyns
Small Moving Parts by Sally-Ann Murray (Kwela). Her vast ragbag of 1960s recollections are a scintillating addition to the “childhood under apartheid” sub-genre.
Ways of Staying by Kevin Bloom (Picador Africa). Updates the picture soberingly, taking a long hard look at the present state of the rainbow nation, and refraining from despair only by a moving act of faith.
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (Vintage). A new discovery for me this year, prompted by the movie. Originally published in 1961, this harrowing drama of suburban disaffection has lost nothing of its bleak power.
Romanian-German author Herta Müller won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature; she receives her award later this week with the other 2009 Nobel laureates (including US president Barack Obama). The author delivered her Nobel lecture in Stockholm yesterday:
DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF was the question my mother asked me every morning, standing by the gate to our house, before I went out onto the street. I didn’t have a handkerchief. And because I didn’t, I would go back inside and get one. I never had a handkerchief because I would always wait for her question. The handkerchief was proof that my mother was looking after me in the morning. For the rest of the day I was on my own. The question DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF was an indirect display of affection. Anything more direct would have been embarrassing and not something the farmers practiced. Love disguised itself as a question. That was the only way it could be spoken: matter-of-factly, in the tone of a command, or the deft maneuvers used for work. The brusqueness of the voice even emphasized the tenderness. Every morning I went to the gate once without a handkerchief and a second time with a handkerchief. Only then would I go out onto the street, as if having the handkerchief meant having my mother there, too.
Twenty years later I had been on my own in the city a long time and was working as a translator in a manufacturing plant. I would get up at five a.m.; work began at six-thirty. Every morning the loudspeaker blared the national anthem into the factory yard; at lunch it was the workers’ choruses. But the workers simply sat over their meals with empty tinplate eyes and hands smeared with oil. Their food was wrapped in newspaper. Before they ate their bit of fatback, they first scraped the newsprint off the rind. Two years went by in the same routine, each day like the next.
In the third year the routine came to an end. Three times in one week a visitor showed up at my office early in the morning: an enormous, thick-boned man with sparkling blue eyes—a colossus from the Securitate.
The first time he stood there, cursed me, and left.
Mrs Lanskaya died on the day her daughter graduated from Sutton College. A new fountain had just been bequeathed to its campus by a former student, the widow of a shah. Generally speaking, one should carefully preserve in transliteration the feminine ending of a Russian surname (such as -aya, instead of the masculine -iy or -oy) when the woman in question is an artistic celebrity. So let it be “Landskaya”— land and sky and the melancholy echo of her dancing name. The fountain took quite a time to get correctly erected after an initial series of unevenly spaced spasms. The potentate had been potent till the absurd age of eighty. It was a very hot day with its blue somewhat veiled. A few photographers moved among the crowd as indifferent to it as specters doing their spectral job. And certainly for no earthly reason does this passage ressemble in rhythm another novel, My Laura, where the mother appears as “Maya Umanskaya”, a fabricated film actress.
Literary critic Stephen Gray understandably balked at the suggestion from an acquaintance that South Africans leave their stories for others to write. Having published numerous works himself, including Remembering Bosman (most recently) and Selected Poems 1960-92, Gray nonetheless found himself hard-pressed to present a defense, and ultimately, it seems, has taken a seat in the opposition’s camp.
South African writers have failed to assert ownership over the country’s grand narratives, says Gray, presenting a litany of themes seized upon by literary uitlanders that SA pens, to his mind, should have got to first.
Is this true – do we ignore our own stories? Gray’s evidence is plucked mainly from the past: he doesn’t mention the plethora of SA books that take up contemporary SA issues, for instance – books like Antjie Krog’s Begging to Be Black, Mamphela Ramphele’s Laying Ghosts to Rest and Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift.
But Gray does wheel out some big names – Thomas Pynchon, anyone? – and utlimately this firepower might carry the debate. Muster your thoughts, then read on:
Why is it Thomas Pynchon writing wonderfully about the Bondelswart Rebellion of 1922 (in his V. of 1961) and then again about the raucous Abbé de la Caille in the Cape, measuring out the world bit by bit (in Mason & Dixon of 1997)?
Why the Canadian Alistair MacLeod dealing with recent immigrants into South Africa (in No Great Mischief of 2001 and his Island stories of 2002)? Following on from the devastating Scotsman, Irvine Welsh, writing about growing up on the East Rand (in Marabou Stork Nightmares of 1996)? Why was it left to the spectacular Spaniard, Javier Marias, to deal with the last of our De Wets, flying his mercy missions against fascism into Abyssinia (in Dark Back of Time, published originally in 1988)? And the Congolese Emmanuel Dongala to launch ditto in French for insurrectionists within South Africa itself (in Jazz et Vin de Palme of 1982)?
Alert! South Africans starved of 2009 Nobel literature prize winner Herta Müller’s fiction will soon have cause to celebrate: Penguin is releasing her best-known title, The Land of Green Plums – translated by Michael Hoffmann – in a new edition at the end of this month.
More from the Penguins:
Widely regarded as Müller’s best novel, The Land of Green Plums is a beautifully written and unflinching autobiographical portrayal of life under the totalitarian regime of Ceauşescu’s Romania.
Set in Romania at the height of Ceauşescu’s reign of terror, The Land of Green Plums tells the story of a group of young students, each of whom has left the impoverished provinces in search of better prospects in the city. It is a profound illustration of a totalitarian state which comes to inhabit every aspect of life; to the extent that everyone, event the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors, or resist them and perish.
About the author
Born in Romania in 1953, Herta Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu’s Secret Police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin. A renowned novelist, poet and essayist, Müller won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.
The Land of the Green Plums will be available from end November 2009 for a recommended retail price R140.
Chinua Achebe, celebrated author, needs no introduction. This year he releases his first major work in decades – The Education of a British Protected Child, which offers “reflections on personal and collective identity, on home and family, on literature, language and politics, and on the author’s lifelong attempt to reclaim the definition of ‘Africa’ for its own authorship”.
We bring you a just-published podcast from the Bard era (1994, to be precise), in which Achebe reads from his celebrated novel, Anthills of the Savannah – as well as an Igbo dirge in honour of Martin Luther King. The recording has surfaced on the web to mark Achebe’s return to the Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City earlier this month, where he was in conversation with noted American academic K Anthony Appiah.
Achebe and Appiah’s conversation was video recorded; you can watch it in full at the link below. But first the podcast:
Podcast: Chinua Achebe reads from Anthills of the Savannah
“For so many readers around the world, it is Chinua Achebe who opened up the magic casements of African fiction,” said K Anthony Appiah. Watch his conversation with the iconic author:
Romanian-German author Herta Müller 
