ANNOUNCEMENT Poetry Foundation Ghana announces its inaugural (2013) GHANA POETRY PRIZE. This will be an award of Gh ₵ 2,000 (equivalent to $ 1,000). This is built on the hugely successful 2012 Online Competition which was done under the name Ghana Poetry Awards. The aim of this prize is to support younger emerging poets. The Prize is sponsored by Poetry Foundation Ghana and we hope to increase our...
That makes Americanah a new kind of migration story, one that reflects a political shift and suggests a literary one. It’s one of the better novels I’ve read about life in contemporary America, but I’m not tempted to call it a Great American Novel. Instead, it strikes me as an early, imperfect, admirable stab at something new: a Great Global Novel. Ifemelu was well on her way to becoming an American—that...
Rudyard Kipling signed his letters very sincerely, but he was not sincere. In his own Just So story of how his books came to be, the author of The Jungle Book and Kim cagily admits to plagiarism . Read more... ...
In this lively interview , Lit author Mary Karr calls James Frey a "lying sack of shit" and says "Dr. Drew should be shot." Read more... ...
Writing. I had never loved literature. I grew up in a place where Arts students were called ‘unserious’ while the Science students were praised for their serious-mindedness. And being a teenager who always felt she had something to prove, I joined the Science class. Later I would go on to study Computer Science. But I lost all that seriousness and consciousness that Science required. Perhaps I began...
On Saturday, Soyinka gave a rather revealing account of his relationship with Achebe and his sense of Achebe’s work within the context of the African literary tradition. It was in the form an interview done by Sahara Reporters, who as we all know are very skilled at making interviewees respond to controversial questions. I find the interview to be a strange document. First of all, I find it odd that...
"In a wide-ranging interview with SaharaReporters, Soyinka paid tribute to the late novelist who died on March 21, 2013 at 82. Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature, also spoke on his personal relationship with Achebe and other Nigerian writers; his regrets about Achebe’s last book, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra; and his attempt to talk the late Biafran leader, Emeka...
"I still feel very homeless. I live in London and have been here nearly my whole life, but it is a difficult city to connect to. I have travelled around and found my body making more sense elsewhere. But I have started to understand what it feels like to belong, so I look forward to exploring different countries and seeing how fully I can feel at home in a place, that at the end of the day, isn’t...
s leading literary lights like emcee Willie Geist and featured co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin gathered beneath a giant fake blue whale in the Museum of Natural History and all Twittered at each other because they had one of those big Twitter screens that everyone puts up at big events these days to leverage high-impact engagement of #socialmedia #wins. Philip Roth didn...
Congratulations, Warsan! Well-deserved.. The Kenyan-born Somali poet WARSAN SHIRE has been announced as the first ever winner of the Brunel University African Poetry Prize. The prize of £3,000 is funded by Brunel University, Commonwealth Writers and The Africa Centre. Warsan Shire is a 24 year old Kenyan-born Somali poet and writer, based in London. Born in 1988, she has read her work all over Britain...
The ongoing evolution of former poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic into the world's best blogger is the greatest thing going in American letters. Read more... ...
Has Adichie stolen Achebe's legacy? Okezie J. S. Nwoka seems to believe so. Question for Okezie J.S. Nwoka: When did Achebe patent his legacy? Well, it does appear that his arguments need some more support. Anyway, read: "I humbly submit that Adichie has stolen the legacy of a literary giant for the sake of her own personal self-advancement. Adichie has hijacked the literary memory of Chinua...
Chika Unigwe has a new short story. "When Godwin came home with his wife, his sisters hid their faces behind their hands and laughed. They said hello to their new sister-in-law and told her they were happy to meet her but he could see the laughter bubbling underneath like a boil about to burst. Godwin had told them on the phone that she was not beautiful, but he had said nothing about her corpulence...
A nice one by my friend, Akin. "A phone call from Lagos woke me to the rumor of Achebe’s death early in the morning of March 22. The caller, journalist and author Kunle Ajibade, was not sure, and he wanted me to call Nigerian friends to confirm or dismiss the news. I left several voice messages, and the one person who picked my call said something very significant, moments after we had come to terms...
This is a must read for writers, or aspiring ones. " Nigerians are in love with language, though meaning is not always a priority - C Don Adinuba hacks through the thickets. "‘I never perused the inner anatomy of the female homo sapiens,” the eminent historian Emmanuel Ayandele once announced to his bewildered students. This was the former vicechancellor’s way of confiding that he had remained chaste...
s held a highly compensated job in finance and founded a multimillion-dollar media company, still retains his ability to be astounded by the little things in life. Like airplanes: what is it like to ride in one? Or women: are they too lazy to get good jobs? Or Jews: why do people hate them so much ? Today, Henry Blodget, who has retained the wonderful ability to see the world through a child...
A recently uncovered essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island , the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , and other things on your fifth grade summer reading list, shows that the Scottish writer was kind of a curmudgeon when it came to his contemporaries. Basically, he thought they were such a drag . Read more... ...
Just like the tweedy detective, Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts are obsessive, fanatical, and even controlling. Hence—Sherlock Holmes and the Clamorous Debate Over Public Domain Rights. Read more... ...
s most famous living short story writer, but still never published a novel. Wouldn't you really really want to write a novel? In other words: Why the hell hasn...
Teju Cole, the novelist , essayist , art historian and master tweeter , wrote seven short stories about drones — the unmanned aerial vehicles used by the U.S. for covert assassination in foreign countries — on his Twitter feed yesterday. Here they are. Read more... ...