AiW guest James Smith. Nina Munk’s The Idealist: Jeffery Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty (Random House) isn’t a book only about Jeffery Sachs. It’s a book about the world as we would like it to be, an uncomfortable… Read More ›
Reviews & Spotlights on…
To write poetry after Pistorius is insufficient: rapture, rupture and narrative non-fiction in South Africa
By AiW Guest Anneke Rautenbach. Tom Wolfe, as early as 1973, spoke of a new form of writing that “consumes devices that happen to have originated with the novel and mixes them with every other technique known to prose. And… Read More ›
African Studies Classics: Lagosian Print Culture and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic
This is the first post of ‘African Study Classics’: a series about how intellectuals used key African history, anthropology, sociology and literature books in their own work. We are inviting writers (academics or not) to tell us about a book… Read More ›
Q&A with ‘Diary of a Zulu Girl’ author Mike Maphoto
Mike Maphoto’s ‘Diary of a Zulu Girl’ blog is something of a digital literature phenomenon. Since it began a scant five months ago in April 2013, it has had more than 10 million page views from 22 countries, spawned numerous… Read More ›
Is there a market (in Africa) for contemporary African art?
By Africa in Words Guest Jürg Schneider. In a period of dramatically shifting geopolitics where markets as well as people have to readjust in an accelerated pace to new constellations of players and rules there is a lot of excitement… Read More ›
Review: Imraan Coovadia’s ‘The Institute for Taxi Poetry’
AiW Guest Tom Penfold. Imraan Coovadia’s The Institute of Taxi Poetry (Umuzi, 2012) is an appeal to the imagination – the reader’s and South Africa’s. Set through a week in the life of Adam Ravens as he tries to make sense of… Read More ›
Marli Roode, ‘Call it Dog’ and Achmat Dangor’s ‘Strange Pilgrimages’ – after Edinburgh Book Festival, 2013
This post draws together reflections on two sessions from the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2013, featuring books from or about South Africa – one called Getting Over Apartheid with award-winning South African author Achmat Dangor (unfortunately, Sindiwe Magona had to cancel, so Dangor appeared alone), and another… Read More ›
Lauren Beukes and African Science Fiction
Africa in Words Guest, Professor James Smith of the University of Edinburgh, writes: Professionally I research the role science and technology play in shaping Africa’s development. Thus I naturally have an interest in the writing of Lauren Beukes given her… Read More ›
Spotlight on…Akinwumi Isola
This post is the first in an occasional series of writer profiles, looking especially at those working in African languages. For readers and speakers of Yoruba, Akínwùmí Ìsòlá [pronounced Ishola] needs little introduction. A charismatic and stern-looking figure affectionately nicknamed… Read More ›
From the ‘African Booker’ to ‘The Booker’: NoViolet Bulawayo’s ‘We Need New Names’
NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names ends its first and last chapters with the same sensory detail: the alternately ‘dizzying’ and ‘delicious’ smell of Lobels bread. It is a smell that wafts through otherwise macabre scenes. In the first, a woman… Read More ›
Borrowing the bookshelf: lessons in [virtual bookshelf] husbandry
I came across a meme recently “You know you’re a bookaholic when…” One was “when the first thing you look at in a friend’s house is the bookshelves”. I identified. I house sat for another Africa in Words writer recently,… Read More ›
‘Love is Power or Something Like That’ by A. Igoni Barrett – review
It feels exceptionally hard in a short review to do justice to the layers of story, character and life in A. Igoni Barrett’s second collection of short stories Love is Power or Something Like That. The characters that people these stories range across generation… Read More ›
The Small Publishers’ Catalogue 2013
This year sees the new edition of Modjaji Books’ Small Publishers’ Catalogue, which updates the first edition of 2010. Publishing Perspectives have called this one ‘a beauty’, and indeed it is, in concept and design. The print copy is, again, a lovely size, great… Read More ›
‘Ghana Must Go’ by Taiye Selasi – review
AiW Guest Emylia Hall One of my favourite quotes on the subject of the craft of writing comes from the Pulitzer Prize-winner, Katherine Anne Porter: ‘Get so well acquainted with your characters that they live and grow in your imagination exactly… Read More ›
Failures of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993)
Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic – book and concept – has been a relevant reference for African and Atlantic studies. In JSTOR, a database of academic papers, when the words “black Atlantic” and “Gilroy” are used in the search engine, more… Read More ›
Bayan Layi : Blogging the Caine Prize
I just talk without direction, like the harmattan wind that just blows and blows, scattering dust. Me, I just like to say it as I remember it. And sometimes you have to explain the story. Sometimes the explanation lies… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s ‘The Whispering Trees’
AiW Guest Sylvia Gasana Hauntingly beautiful! Those are the two first words that come to mind when describing Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s ‘The Whispering Trees’. I’m always very excited to read a story that has a title that instantly transports you…. Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize – Pede Hollist’s ‘Foreign Aid’
Coming to the Caine Prize blog party late in terms of Pede Hollist’s ‘Foreign Aid’, I’m aware that a lot of the ground on this story has already been covered – see the end of this post for links to… Read More ›
‘Deliver us from Evil’: A Review of Tope Folarin’s ‘Miracle’
AiW Guest Gbemisola Abiola. Tope Folarin’s Miracle depicts the prevailing belief in Christian supernaturalism, and the apparent promise of prosperity it holds for the African adherent, as the means of achieving success in the Diasporas. While the story is set in… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Tope Folarin’s ‘Miracle’
There were moments in Tope Folarin’s ‘Miracle’ where I found myself part of a sweaty crowd in a packed church, as the pastor says ‘let us pray’, the ‘tinny Nigerian gospel music’ rings out, and prayer commences with ‘sweating and… Read More ›
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