ImageNations

The 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction has been announced. Though ImageNations was supporting Aminatta Forna with her The Memory of Love to win, things went in the way of the Serbian/American Author    Téa Obreht with her debut novel The Tiger's Wife (Weindedfeld and Nicolson). At 25, Obreht becomes the youngest-ever author to win the prize. In its sixteenth anniversary this year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from throughout the world. This comes timely as Naipaul in his ever caustic remarks has recently indicated that women authors, including Jane Austen, are inferior to him. Or so he was supposed to have said and this has generated a lot of heat in the literary blogging world, to which I have added my two pesewas, in the form of comments, here and there. At a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, the 2011 Chair of Judges, Bettany Hughes, presented Obreht with the  £ 30,000 and the 'Be...

The Orange Prize for Fiction has announced its shortlist for the 2011 prize. From the long-list of 20 books written by women, the shortlist is made up of 6 books from different parts of the world. The number of African women authors have also dropped from 3 to 1: The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna. Below is the list: Room by  Emma Donoghue  The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson Great House by Nicole Krauss The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht Annabel by Kathleen Winter Click here for the full announcement . We wish Aminatta Forna well in this award.

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 . 

My post on June 8, 2010 was titled ' The Zimbabwe I know '. In that post I bemoaned, partially, what has now become Zimbabwe; of the human right abuses and our complicity in it and our failure to recognise the good things that is Zimbabwe. I then went ahead to chastised people for treading the path of the media moguls for painting Zimbabwe dark. I especially talked about the literary talents that abound in Zimbabwe and the need for us to talk about it, shout about it and inform all. Today I have been vindicated. Whilst surfing the net, I came across the blog entry ' Zimbabwe Writer Wins 2010 Orange Award for New Writers ' at the blog ' Wealth of Ideas ' managed by Emmanuel Sigauke, co-editor for the first StoryTime anthology 'Africa Roar'. I was happy and quickly went ahead to read and checked out this wonderful author.  Irene Sabatini won her category with the book 'The Boy Next Door'. According to the Chair  Judge,  Di Speirs, ...