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Four years after its first publication, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s award-winning debut novel House of Stone has now been published by Interkontinental Verlag in the German translation of Simone Jakob. The weighty subject Tshuma chose for House of Stone is the Gukurahundi, the genocide in Zimbabwe that took place in the 1980s under Prime Minister Robert […]
more...Margaret Busby’s anthology Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present came out in 1992, a groundbreaking collection of over 1000 pages that brought together a breathtaking array of work, spanning different genres and various works of translation. New Daughters of Africa is the follow-up volume, first published in 2019, and, while clocking in at a modest 900-odd pages, is an equally impressive project.
more...“Politics is my first love”, she begins, and it certainly shows as the novel tracks a particular political time and feeling: one where revolutionary hopes give way to futures that fall short of expectation. It is a complex story, succinctly described by the book jacket as “connecting contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising — and refracting this globe-trotting and time-travelling through [Langston] Hughes’ confessional letters to a South African protégé about the poet’s time in Shanghai [in the 1930s]”.
more...Now in its fifth year running, taking place from 25-27 August in the Alte Münze at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, the African Book Festival Berlin, organised by the team at InterKontinental, serves as a vital platform for African literature in Berlin’s — and Germany’s — literary scene.
more...Since Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, the Zanzibar-born author who lives in the UK has suddenly become known to mainstream audiences. Gurnah’s 2001 novel By the sea is about a dispute between two families that takes place against a backdrop of political change.
more...Although “Welcome to Lagos” partly tells of tragic circumstances and corruption, the first adjective that comes to my mind to describe it is: funny.
more...Sulaiman Addonia’s second novel offers a chaotic depiction of the inner workings of a refugee camp in Sudan following an exceptional and exceptionally close pair of siblings.
more...The first woman opens up enriching perspectives on being a woman and friendships between women. For me it was a real reading pleasure: The book is definitely one of my Top 10 of the year 2020!
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