We have a shortlist for the Nigerian Prize for Literature 2014 ladies and gentlemen. For the uniformed The Nigeria Prize for Literature rotates yearly amongst four literary genres: prose fiction, poetry, drama and children’s literature. This year’s prize is for drama and comes with a cash prize of $100, 000. The longlist was announced in […]
Wanjiku Wa Ngugi is a daughter of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o who is yet again being tipped as a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize for literature. She showed that she too could get published when she unleashed to the unsuspecting public a book called The Fall of Saints. It is a whodunit type of book which […]
I knew that blogging about African literature would come in handy one day. Turns out Africa’s “largest publishing event” the Footnote Summit is set to happen in Nairobi on 23th September 2014. It will be happening alongside the 17th Nairobi International Book Fair (24th September to 28th September 2014) so that means a lot of […]
The South African National Book Week started out this weekend in capital city Johanessburg and will be happening for the rest of the week. The idea of the week is to celebrate book. Proving that a serious government should be doing such things as standard the new guy at the ministry Bwana Nathi Mthethwa and […]
So you heard about Ebola and how it is terrorising the Western part of this continent no? Well its concerning many people who want to head to that part of our rock for whatever reason. Well even the literature world is not spared as two of the biggest literary festivals were lined up for Nigeria; […]
21st September will be a very special day as we mark the 1st anniversary of the infamous Al Shabaab attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi that traumatized us all so much. This day was especially trauma inducing for the literary community in Kenya as its premier literary festival the Storymoja Hay Festival was happening […]
The discussion about the languages we use to write our literature isn’t about to end any time soon. The debate has raged for years; write in the language of The Man (English, French, Arabic) or in our own (Swahili, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Kinyarwanda, Shona, Zulu, Xhosa, Baganda, Nyanja, Somali, Amharic… I can go all day […]
Yesterday I gave you a report from the Hargeysa International Book Fair 2014. Today I give you images from the same festival. All images are courtesy of Kate Stanworth and HIBF and come from different sessions of the festival. Enjoy. (P.S. You want to check out this version of Pharell Williams Happy from the good […]
My first experience of Hargeysa was in Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchid of Lost Souls about three women and the way that they cope as their city falls apart. It was set in the late 1980s as Somalia fell apart. The Hargeysa of today is different in ways that one cannot imagine if you are obsessed […]
Niq Mhlongo was one of the battalion of South African writers who invaded Scotland for one of the biggest literature festivals on the planet: The Edinburgh International Book Festival. The writer is well known for his books Dog Eat Dog, After Tears and his latest Way Back Home which is as good a book as […]
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