AiW Guest: Doseline Kiguru Writing in 2000, only six years after the end of apartheid, Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael in Senses of Culture decried that South African cultural and literary imaginings have been based mainly on the following frames:… Read More ›
AiW Guest Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed Efemia Chela’s ‘Chicken’ initially felt like two different stories told in three parts. This was until I gave it another read and realised its three separate parts tell an interesting coming-of-age story. Our narrator, Kaba, is at… Read More ›
AiW Guest Anthea Gordon In Binyavanga Wainana’s influential essay ‘How to Write About Africa’, one of his many salient pieces of tongue-in-cheek advice is: ‘be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Doseline Kiguru As I began to read ‘My Father’s Head’, I thought for a moment that it was going to be yet another Caine Prize story set in church and about cunning priests and their gullible as well as… Read More ›
A story about waste – human waste – in immaculate prose, Diane Awerbuck’s ‘Phosphorescence’ has, for me, a quality of suspension. On the one hand, it’s about the defiant resistance of ‘an old lady’ against loss, of her habitual daily… Read More ›
A note of intro. from Africa in Words: Last year we took part in ‘Blogging the Caine Prize’ – a carnival of week-by-week blogging around the shortlist for the annual Caine Prize for African writing. While there is no ‘organised’ carnival… Read More ›
Following on from last week’s Mandela retrospective, here are some posts readers may wish to revisit – or discover for the first time from the AiW 2013 archive. If you’re a fan of the ‘best of’ lists that dominate publishing… Read More ›
On Monday Tope Folarin’s ‘Miracle’ was announced as the winner of the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing. Building up to this announcement the five shortlisted writers spent a week in the UK, talking about their writing in the media… Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Last week saw the announcement of the shortlist for the 14th Caine Prize for African Writing. The shortlist of 5 stories was selected by judges Gus Casely-Hayford (Chair), Sokari Douglas Camp, John Sutherland, Nathan Hensley and Leila Aboulela out of… Read More ›
