What are your thoughts on “African Books to Inspire”? I spend most of my time looking into the screen of my laptop waiting for the right phrase, the better wording of a sentence – sensing semi-formed ideas welling up –…
Ben Okri contends that the oldest technology in the world is… Storytelling. “We are storytelling beings” and even our most rational and calculated thought is far better represented as a narrative: Einstein made relativity accessible by the story of two…
Africa in Words writer C. E. Hastings has had a long hard look at Tim Parks’ essay, Writing Adrift in the World, and sets out her case against the ‘significance of a geographically specific literary canon.’ Parks brands writers of such…
Forever supplying us with lists of newly published and newly found talent, blogger Bookshy has opened up a whole new world of African authors usually left inaccessible to the strict Anglophones among us. In digging through the archives of the…
“He was a man who answered the questions of his times, the times in which he found himself, in tough, brief, elegant novels and in doing that actually helped to create a language of literature in which many of us…
Only free people can make a free world. Infect the world with your light. Help fulfil the golden prophecies. Press forward the human genius. Our future is greater than our past. The last four lines of Ben Okri’s poem,…
Do you want to feature on the #Africawrites blog? You can if you share your book of inspiration with us! In the lead up to our live African Books to Inspire evening, hosted by journalist Hannah Pool, we want to…
What is your “African book to inspire”? It has to be Things Fall Apart – usual suspect, yes, I know, but I had to choose it. I first read it back in my student day and apart from being ‘the…
Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart. Wole Woyinka. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. These are the familiar writers and book titles that feature on African literature lists. It’s hardly surprising since they are among the greats – and we are of course big fans…
I’m not too certain about many things. And I’m not sure who I am. I ain’t got no mother and no father. I’m slow like the trees when they grow. I’m sluggish, like the ocean when it moves. Ben…