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 ›
Caine Prize 2014
Blogging the Caine Prize: Tendai Huchu’s ‘The Intervention’
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 ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Okwiri Oduor’s ‘My Father’s Head’
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 ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Diane Awerbuck’s ‘Phosphorescence’
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 ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Billy Kahora’s ‘The Gorilla’s Apprentice’
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 ›
Perhaps you missed… some South African-born short (plus a bit of long) fiction news
Some fiction news from South Africa in these last few weeks – the shorts: Twenty in 20 – a call for your bests of the South African short story since 1994 | the Sunday Times Lifestyle Magazine (27th… Read More ›