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The Orange Prize long list has just been published. The list include highly successful books such as Emma Donoghue's Room , which was shortlisted for the Booker Awards and Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love  which recently won the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award for Africa Region .  Leila Aboulela  also won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000 with  The Museum .Out of the twenty (20) long-listed books, three of them are by Africans: The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Sierra Leone) The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin (Nigeria) Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela (Sudan) The Orange prize was created to celebrate "excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing throughout the world". Read more about the long-listed authors here . Also read my interview with Lola Shoneyin here . 

Title: Opening Spaces: Contemporary African Women's Writing Editor: Yvonne Vera Genre: Short Story Antholgy/Feminism Publishers: Heinemann (African Writers Series) Pages: 186 Year of First Publication: 1999 Country: Various This is a collection of 15 short stories by African women from 11 different countries. The anthology includes Leila Aboulela's Caine Prize winning story The Museum.  With the exception of a few stories like Crocodile Tails, A State of Outrage, The Barrel of a Pen, and The Home-Coming , the stories revolve around polygamous husbands, domineering husbands, rape, domestic violence, girl empowerment and combinations of these. The collection opens with Ama Ata Aidoo's The Girl Who can , which is a story about a girl who was looked down by her grandmother because she has lanky legs.  'But Adjoa has legs,' Nana would insist; 'except that they are too thin. And also too long for a woman. Kaya, listen. Once in a while, but onl...

Fathers & Daughters - An Anthology of Exploration  (Ayebia Clarke, 2008; 200) is a collection of essays, poems and short stories about the relationships between daughters and fathers told from the point of view of either the father or the daughter. There is that belief, true or otherwise, that a daughter's first love is the father. Yet, it is all too clear that in Africa, this father-daughter relationship has poorly been explored. Ato Quayson's book is the first book I have come across that donates its pages to such an important exploration. It is said that until the lion learns to speak, tales of the hunt will always favour the hunter. Thus, until fathers learn to tell their side of the stories, men's representation in African novels will always go against them. The role of men in books like Nervous Conditions , So Long a Letter , Joys of Motherhood , Purple Violet of Oshaantu , Purple Hibiscus , Opening Spaces: African Women Writing  and many others are nothing...

I had always known that the announcement of the Caine Prize for African Writing would fall on my birthday. However, in joyful and thoughtful moods that birthdays always bestow upon its adult celebrants, I entirely forgot to follow the announcement on twitter. Thanks, however, to the internet I have been able to retrieve the announcement of the winner. Press Release Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo has won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa’s leading literary award, for her short story entitled ‘Hitting Budapest’, from The Boston Review, Vol 35, no. 6 – Nov/Dec 2010. The Chair of Judges, award-winning author Hisham Matar, announced NoViolet Bulawayo as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held this evening (Monday 11 July) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Hisham Matar said: The language of ‘Hitting Budapest’ crackles. Here we encounter Darling, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Stina and Sbho, a gang reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. But these ...

Jonathan Tel from the UK has won the 2015 Commonwealth 2015 Short Story Prize for his story The Human Phonograph. Within its short form, the story encompasses great sweeps of the world and its history – from the US moon landing to Chinese nuclear tests to reading 19th century Russian literature. The protagonist of the story is a lonely figure in this vast world. “The Human Phonograph ranges from the personal to the universal. The resonances remained with the judges, long after the reading. As one said, we were drawn into the lonely world of the protagonist and we stayed there. It is a disconcerting, extraordinary story of an individual in search of independence and reassurance in a difficult world,” said Romesh Gunesekera, Chair of the international panel of judges. The Human Phonograph is published by The Guardian online . Its writer, Jonathan Tel, is himself a polymath with interests as varied as those in his story. A theoretical physicist and opera librettist, he has previously p...

For other categories,  see Review I have sought to read from as many parts of Africa as possible. This index categorises authors by country. The categorisation is such that authors are listed according to the nationality they possessed when their works became famous. Thus, Bessie head is considered a Motswana from Botswana rather than a South African and Coetzee, a South African rather than an Australian. Non-African authors are listed under 'Other Countries'. Always, the author's last name comes first.  Anthologies:  If it is a single-authored anthology, the author's name appears under the country where the author comes from. For multiple-authored anthologies only the editor('s') name(s) are (are) used. If the anthology is multiple-editored and the editors come from the same country, only the name of the editor which comes first at the back of the book is used (example Ivor Hartmann and Emmanuel Sigauke both come from Zimbabwe, only the former is ...