As a Zimbabwean author, Shimmer Chinodya is often asked about politics, but he prefers to focus on the personal.
“In this part of the world, politics are imposed on you,” Chinodya said at the weekend in discussion with Annie Gagiano at the Woordfees in Stellenbosch. His novels and short stories are not overtly political, but he writes about ordinary people trying to survive, against a political backdrop.
Gagiano pointed out that Chinodya’s novels are very concerned with the intimate details of people’s lives – and often stray into autobiographical territory. “Writers should write about what they know,” Chinodya said. He writes about his own views on life and relationships.
“All my books are painful portraits,” he said. To Chinodya writing is a way to revisit memories of suffering and to create something positive out of pain. He has an “old-fashioned” belief in honest descriptions of scenes and situations.
This is not to say that the author isn’t still commenting on society, however. “A good writer must change you and get you thinking about things,” he said.
“I want shock you, drag you by the neck, say look at this… look at this. That is my plan.”
And what about the politics of writing in English as apposed to his home language, Shona?
Chinodya believes writing in a foreign language is a form of repossession. “English imposed itself on me, now all I can do is to impose my thought process, values and beliefs on English.”
Chinodya draws from two linguistic cultures and comes up with a hybrid. He definitely makes this personal, political language his own.
Alert! The title story of Petina Gappah’s juggernaut debut collection, An Elegy for Easterly, has been shortlisted for the world’s richest short story prize, the £25 000 UK Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.
Rules in general are restrictive. I am told by creative writing teachers that many would-be writers imitate that great short-story writer, Raymond Carver. This leads to an almost-rule — consider the fact that there are other ways of writing, besides Carver’s.
Read very widely, and all kinds of different authors. The American writer Michael Chabon has made fierce fun of that other traditional piece of shortstory wisdom — that a story should show a single emotion perfectly and end in an epiphany. Chabon said rightly that a piece of short fiction could tell a story, could set out to entertain, could contain a helterskelter of disparate things and happenings, and still be a short story.
Meanwhile, in other matters Sunday Times, but rather closer to home, Gappah has signed with South Africa’s largest English weekly to write a 900 word column once a fortnight, as she tells her fans on her blog:
Finally, for people like Jonathan Masere who missed my Zimbabwe Times column, I am thrilled to say that the Sunday Times South Africa has offered me a column. At over half a million, the Sunday Times has the largest circulation of any weekly newspaper in South Africa, and it also circulates in neighbouring countries including my own Zimbabwe. I have great admiration for editor Mondli Makhanya, and columnists like Justice Malala and Ben Trovato so I am very pleased indeed to be part of the Sunday Times family.
The first column in the series was apparently published yesterday, thought it doesn’t seem to have appeared online at TimesLive yet. We’ll keep a watch out for it – and if any reader should spot the relevant link, please post it as a comment below. Thanks!
Alert!Petina Gappah’s debut collection of shorts stories, An Elegy for Easterly, has been shortlisted for a 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Award – namely, the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
The prize carries a purse of $500 – which seems a bit stingy for a major US newspaper’s award? – and the winner, along with a whole bevy of others, will be announced on Friday, April 23 in Los Angeles.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Good luck to Gappah!
Alert! The title story in Petina Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly has been longlisted for a lucrative new annual literary award sponsored by the UK’s Sunday Times, the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.
“Elegy” is one of twenty stories on the longlist, which also includes Kay Sexton, “a former glamour model who now writes erotica”. The award is set to be judged by Brit lit heavyweights Nick Hornby, Hanif Kureishi and AS Byatt, as well as the Times‘ literary editor Andrew Holgate and one Lord Matthew Evans.
Here’s the Times‘ announcement and longlist:
Sexton is joined on the long list for the prize, which is open to published authors from anywhere in the world and carries a prize of £25,000, by Simon Robson, a Rada-trained actor, and Charles Mosley, former editor-in-chief of Burke’s Peerage.
Tremain, who won the Orange prize in 2008 for her novel The Road Home, said: “It’s a tough form of writing because you must have cohererence in just a few thousand words, while with a novel you can have some ‘bagginess’.”
Six of the longlisted authors are also award-winning poets, including Jackie Kay and John Burnside.
To mark the advent of the new award, its director and Times‘ short story editor Cathy Galvin presents readers with an new short by Kureishi, “A Terrible Story”:
When Eric slammed the front door it was cold outside and raining hard. With winter already coming, he was reluctant to go out. But he’d said he’d meet Jake at seven and he couldn’t let him down. Not that he had far to go; it took Eric five minutes to get to his local place.
He hurried into the bright, warm and almost-empty cafe, hung up his coat and sat down. The waiters knew him and brought him the wine he liked without his having to ask. Eric went there most days, to read the paper, make phone calls and work on his computer.
He drank half a glass of wine straight off, to calm himself down after arguing with his wife a few minutes earlier. She and their nine-year-old son had been at the kitchen table doing the boy’s homework, but, having had a glass of wine, Eric had felt inspired to expatiate on the current political situation. His wife told him to shut up, and he hadn’t wanted to; he had something pressing to say. His wife asserted he always had something important to say at the wrong time. Didn’t he want his son to succeed or would the boy be a cretin like his father? The spat accelerated. “You don’t listen to me!” “You don’t speak at the right time, when we want to hear you!” “You’re never receptive!” “You’re a fool!” Eric shuddered and giggled, as he thought of the two of them freely insulting one another, and the boy looking on.
Zimbabwean Chenjerai Hove, author of Bones and Palaver Finish, is a wanted man in his home country for his criticism of the government under President Robert Mugabe.
Since leaving Zim in 2001, Hove, winner of Africa’s prestigious Noma Award, has lived a refugee’s live, travelling from country to country. He recently put down (temporary) roots in Miami, USA, where he’ll be living as the guest of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for the next two years. In this must-read interview Hove talks to Michael Vasques about the events leading up to his arrival in Little Cuba:
The death threats? Too numerous to count. The serious attempts on his life ranged from make-believe doctors offering potentially fatal “medicine” to a traffic accident that was no accident at all.
In his native Zimbabwe, he’s been ranked as high as No. 17 on the government’s Enemies of the State list.
Miami, meet novelist/poet/essayist Chenjerai Hove, Chen to his friends, the author of the highly acclaimed novel, Bones.
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.
The proprietor of Kalk Bay Books‘ latest Sunday Times column:
Among the mis-conceptions I had on opening a bookshop was that I’d have time to read all the books I wanted to, and that there would be a never-ending supply of them.
It’s true that new books arrive every week, but there is also the deep frustration of knowing I will read only a fraction of them.
My sense of hopeless-ness is compounded when I consider that the concept of “new” books is a relative one. As Samuel Butler observed: “The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.”
Alert! The Penguin African Writers Series has just debuted in the UK – featuring five of the six books that appeared under the series’ aegis in South Africa (BOOK SA can’t determine which one was left out; any help on this score is much appreciated) – but the event has left Guardian books critic Akin Ajayi underwhelmed.
The books give the series a backward-looking feel, Ajayi writes. Rather than showcasing what’s new on the continent – with material from the generation driving the likes of Kwani?, Chimurenga or Saraba, for instance – he feels the new AWS editors have opted for works that convey the dusty, if freshly-liberated, Africa of the 20th century:
Perhaps I’m hard to please, but I can’t help feeling a little underwhelmed by Penguin’s new African Writers Series, launched last month and published by its Modern Classics imprint. It’s not that I think the series is a bad thing, far from it, but by modelling itself upon the iconic Heinemann imprint of the same name, the impulse to compare the two is irresistible. And, to judge from the first five books published, I fear that Penguin won’t come out of this looking very good.
First, a bit of context. The original AWS was inaugurated by Heinemann in 1962, the brainchild of publishing executive Alan Hill. Hill, whom Chinua Achebe describes in his book of autobiographical essays Home and Exile as “an adventurer with all the right instincts”, recognised that the nascent post-colonial publishing industry was not supporting the growth of original African literature. Domestic markets at the time were dominated by foreign publishing houses, and were considered primarily a territory for selling books written and published abroad. Not much was happening to encourage and promote new writing from within.
The Oslo House of Literature was an impressive sight recently with the gathering of several big names in African literature – including Petina Gappah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Niq Mhlongo and Binyavanga Wainaina.
Nigeria’s Tolu Ogunlesi (Conquest and Conviviality) was also there and reports back on the experience:
In a piece I wrote after my first visit to Oslo in September 2008 I observed: “To the eyes Oslo is not a very appealing city. To my mind parts of it were plain depressing. In my journal there is a note I made, as follows: ‘Norwegians think [Oslo] is an ugly city. I think so too.’ But it is a city of proud inhabitants.”
Returning a little over a year later for a week-long celebration of African literature organised by the Oslo House of Literature, I’m more forgiving. The city is not that ugly after all. But with a population of about half a million, it will always be a Tiny City in my estimation. Half a million people will be a housing estate in Lagos, I think.
There are no direct flights between Lagos and Oslo. A Lufthansa flight deposited me in the German city of Frankfurt, where I would catch a connecting flight to Oslo’s modest airport. (The last time I was in Oslo I came by train, an endless journey from Gothenburg in neighbouring Sweden to Oslo’s Central train station).
Just before 2010 rolled in, the Guardian’s Claire Armitstead sat down with Petina Gappah to talk the Guardian First Book Prize and the art of the short story – and she also scrutinised the film version of JM Coetzee’s Disgrace. (Plus: Logicomix!) Tune in:
As the Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah becomes the second short story writer to win the Guardian first book award, she explains why short fiction was the perfect form to tell the story of a troubled but irrepressible country.
