Time to update my blog. Ever since I got back from South Africa in September 2010 where I attended the Mail and Guardian Literary Festival and off course the Penguin Prize giving evening, I have suffered a severe case of writer's block. But on a sunny winter's day in Germany, I feel inspired and it is time to start writing again.
The Penguin Non-fiction Prize for African Writing for which I was also nominated, was won by Pius Adesanmi from Nigeria for You’re Not a Country, Africa! Congratulations to him and I certainly do look forward to reading his book, which will be out soon. Pius is professor of English in Canada, and like so many of us, no longer live on the Continent.
"In this groundbreaking collection of essays Pius Adesanmi tries to unravel what it is that Africa means to him as an African, and by extension to all those who inhabit this continent of extremes. This is a question that exercised some of the continent’s finest minds in the twentieth century, but which pan-Africanism, Negritude,nationalism, decolonisation and all the other projects through which Africans sought to restore their humanity ultimately failed to answer. Crisscrossing the continent, Adesanmi engages with the enigma that is Africa in an attempt to make meaning of this question for all twenty-first century Africans."
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| (c) Isabella Morris. Some of the South African nominees at the Penguin Award Ceremony. Me, Isabella Morris, Shubnum Khan, Tebogo Tlharipe. |
As for Traitor's Daughter, I'm currently doing a re-edit before sending off the manuscript to interested publishers. So hold thumbs!
