Olufemi Terry wins "African Booker"

The Caine Prize for African Writing, an annual prize awarded to an author of African origin who has published a short story in English, has bestowed its honor (and it's £10,000 (approx $15,000) prize) on Olufemi Terry for his short story "Stickfighting Days" on July 5.

"Stickfighting Days" tells the story of glue-sniffing young boys who wage playtime wars in a dump in Nairobi. It is the second short story that Terry has written, and it was published in the African magazine Chimurenga (vol. 12/13).

Terry, who was born in Sierra Leone and now lives in Cape Town, South Africa, has lived, worked, and studied in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Côte d'Ivoire, the United States, Kenya, Somalia, and Uganda. A journalist by profession, Terry generally writes about the African diaspora. With his winnings, he hopes to focus on completing a novel tentatively titled The Sum of All Loses.

The Caine Prize for African Writing, frequently called the "African Booker," has been administered every year since 2000. The judges include Fiommetta Rocco, literary editor of The Economist, who called Terry a "talent with an enormous future" and described his story as "ambitious, brave and hugely imaginative ... present[ing] a heroic culture that is Homeric in its scale and conception."

Follow this link to learn more and to purchase the issue of Chimurenga featuring Terry's story.

An Interview with Syl Cheney-Coker

On the eve of the publication of his latest poetry collection, Stone Child, Sierra Leonean Syl Cheney-Coker sat with Niyi Osundare of Newswatch Magazine to discuss his poetry, his country, and his experiences with the publishing industry.

Question: ‘Turkish Diptych’; ‘Iranian Diptych’; Toronto’s Harbourfront; Tupac Amaru of the Incas; Wole Soyinka, Amadu Diallo (‘an unarmed African immigrant shot 41 times by undercover New York Police Department men); The Gods of the G8 Summit; etc. Your poetry breathes with diverse persons and places. What would you say to readers who call you a ‘poet of the world’?

Answer: It is a description that I accept: something, I believe, that comes out of my make-up; the sense of being a cultural hybrid; interconnecting with the rest of the world, free of prejudices and, in reality, benefiting from all the subterranean currents of cultural history that went into making me who I am, and thus, trying to write about it. As human beings, we are the beneficiaries of so many narratives, so many fusions of blood, languages and cultures that we would be foolish to deny. And given that as a poet, I have travelled to and lived on four continents, my poetry is like a sponge that has soaked up all the infusions into that life.

Cheney-Coker, who has been publishing since 1973, is perhaps most well-known for his epic novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, a fantastical chronicle of nearly four centuries of Sierra Leonean history. Cheney-Coker has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Fonlon/Nichols Award, and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and his work has been widely translated. He spends much of his time living, writing, and teaching in the United States.