EC Osondu wins "African Booker"

The £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing, called the African Booker, was awarded to EC Osondu for his short story "Waiting," a sparse and resonant tale about a young boy in a refugee camp.

Osondu, a Nigerian native who now lives in the United States, published the story in Guernicamag.com in October, 2008. In addition to the prize money, he will receive a one-month residency at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, US, with all expenses paid.

The prize, in its tenth year, recognizes the best English-language short story written by an African author. Patrons of the award include Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, and Wole Soyinka.

Algeria welcomes Pan-African festival

The second Pan-African Festival since 1969 began July 5 in Algiers, Algeria, and will run until July 20, celebrating the arts, music, literature, and culture of fifty-one diverse African nations.

The first festival forty years ago celebrated the end of colonialism, but this free, non-commercial event will focus on a rebirth of artistic pursuits, the African cultural renaissance, with 500 musical performances, 41 plays, 9 art exhibitions, and several conferences featuring thousands of intellectuals, performers, and artists. Over two hundred literary titles will be republished and made available to attendees.

All African nations except Morocco will participate in the events, with additional support from the United States and Brazil, who each have substantial African-born populations. "Lucy," one of the oldest preserved remains of human civilization, will leave her home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for only the second time to be exhibited, and other attractions will include an extravagant parade and a fireworks display.

Algerian Minister of Culture Khalida Toumi told Liberté that Panaf 2009 is not a commercial operation, and that it is "the festival of the Algerian people".

"Everything must be free," she said. "The poster shows Africa in fireworks. And, well, that's the programme. All areas of culture will be at their dazzling best."

Vassily Aksyonov dies

The "anti-Soviet Russian" author of 23 novels, who in 1980 was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and spent much of the past three decades in the United States and France, died at 76 on June 6, following a heart attack in Moscow.

Vassily Aksyonov's novels include The Burn and In Search of Melancholy Baby. Publishers Weekly called his wartime saga Generations of Winter "nothing less than a War and Peace for the twentieth century" and compared the novelist to John Dos Passos and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His Voltairiens and Voltairiennes (Voltairian Men and Women) won the Russian Booker Prize in 2004.

Aksyonov was forced into exile in 1980 when his manuscript for The Burn was discovered by the KGB. He taught Russian literature at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, when his citizenship was reinstated. His absence from his country had troubled him, but following the collapse of the USSR his once controversial works received newfound fame. In 2004, Generations of Winter was adapted into a television miniseries.

Aksyonov had been ill for some eighteen months.

On July 6, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said, "His death is an enormous, irreplaceable loss for Russian literature and culture."

His funeral will be held on July 9.

The Bessie Head Literature Awards, 2009

The foremost literary award ceremony in Botswana, the Bessie Head Literature Awards, has announced its winners for 2009, with women leading the pack in all categories.

Cheryl Ntumy, a student at the University of Botswana in Gabarone, won the best novel award for her manuscript Crossing. In the short story category, Gothataone Moeng won for "Putting on Faces," and in poetry the winner was Luda Sekga for "He Was My Oppressor."

The awards, sponsored by Pentagon Publishers, honor the legacy of Bessie Amelia Head, a South African author who sought refuge in Serowe, Botswana, in 1964 and wrote many autobiographical novels set there. She is considered Botswana's most important literary figure.

The ceremony will be held in Gabarone on July 19.

Chris Eaton launches microfiction program on Twitter

In part inspired by Roch Carrier's short excerpt from the short-short story "The Hockey Sweater" on the Canadian five dollar bill, novelist Chris Eaton will begin a microfiction exercise on Twitter on July 4. He will publish twenty-one stories of 140 characters or less, and subscribers are asked to submit story responses to each one, which need not follow the same theme or plot but must contain at least one third of the same words as the original.

The twenty-one stories and the best of the responses will be published in a literary journal anthology entitled GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose.

Chris Eaton, author of The Grammar Architect and The Inactivist, is also the frontman of the alt-folk band Rock Plaza Central.

Greatest Maltese Novel?

L-Ghalqa Ta’ L-Iskarjota, a Maltese thriller about investigative journalists preparing a television program, has been hailed by the arts society of Malta as one of the greatest works ever produced on the Mediterranean island, a densely populated nation of 410,000; however, its author, Alfred Sant, is the much-maligned and controversial former prime minister of the Labour Party who has spent seventeen years in public office.

An interview with Sant by Raphael Vassallo of Malta Today illuminates the unique literary community of Malta, with its vibrant linguistic and artistic history despite notoriously close quarters.

The Palestine Festival of Literature

American author Claire Messud, whose 2006 The Emperor's Children was longlisted for a Man Booker Prize, has written a fascinating article for the Boston Globe about her recent visit to the Palestine Festival of Literature, a peaceful celebration of Palestinian letters held illegally in Jerusalem, where to use the word "Palestine" is a security risk and to be Palestinian is to be homeless, lost in time and space yet trapped in the void.

The author and lawyer Raja Shehadeh - a gentle man of Gandhi-esque demeanor, whose book “Palestinian Walks’’ won Britain’s Orwell Prize last year - led us on a walk in the hills outside Ramallah, to show us the land that he loves and upon which he has walked all his life. We scrambled up rocks among terraced olive groves to a stone shepherd’s hut, from which we could see the green and gold hills interlaced to the horizon. We picked our way along a dry riverbed, surprising a patterned tortoise, and on to a small village, where a mangy donkey gazed balefully from its tether and ruddy-faced children demonstrated their tree-climbing prowess.

So simple and beautiful, our walk was, alas, illegal: the olive groves of Raja Shehadeh’s childhood have been declared a militarized zone. We might have been arrested at any moment simply for standing in them. (Israeli settlers, however, are free to walk there; just as they are free to carry arms, and they do.) Part of being Palestinian is having your movements curtailed on every front.

What is a world where you cannot go for a walk, cannot assemble to read and discuss literature in public, cannot be certain of visiting your grandmother in a neighboring city? What is a world where you cannot lose your temper, cannot laugh in the wrong place?

Kureishi adapts The Black Album for the stage

The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi, a 1993 response to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, has been adapted for the stage by the author and will premiere at the National Theatre in London on July 14.

The novel follows Muslim students of various degrees of faith and radicalism as they react to Rushdie's controversial novel in late-80's London. As in The Satanic Verses, Kureishi explores the acclimitazation and repulsion of Western culture by Muslims in an increasingly multicultural London, both the external clashes between warring cultures and the internal clashes of competing identities and values.

In an essay for The Guardian, Kureishi writes:

The fatwa against Rushdie in February 1989 reignited my concern about the rise of Islamic radicalism, something I had become aware of while in Pakistan in 1982, where I was writing My Beautiful Laundrette. But for me, that wasn't the whole story. Much else of interest was happening at the end of the 80s: the music of Prince; the collapse of communism and the "velvet revolution"; the rise of the new dance music, along with the use of a revelatory new drug, ecstasy; Tiananmen Square; Madonna using Catholic imagery in Like a Prayer; postmodernism, "mash-ups", and the celebration of hybridity – partly the subject of The Satanic Verses.

This was also the period, or so I like to think, when Britain became aware that it was changing, or had already changed from a monocultural to a multiracial society, and had realised, at last, that there was no going back. This wasn't merely a confrontation with simple racism, the kind of thing I'd grown up with, which was usually referred to as "the colour problem". When I was young, it was taken for granted that to be black or Asian was to be inferior to the white man. And not for any particular reason. It was just a fact. This was much more than that. Almost blindly, a revolutionary, unprecedented social experiment had been taking place. The project was to turn – out of the end of the Empire, and on the basis of mass immigration – a predominantly white society into a racially mixed one, thus forming a new notion of what Britain was and would become.

A novelist and screenwriter--and now playwright--Kureishi was born in London in 1954 to a Pakistani father and English mother. His 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia won a Whitbread Award for best first novel, and his screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears, was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar at the 1987 Academy Awards.

Twittergate!

Alice Hoffman, the author of Practical Magic and the more recent The Story Sisters, blasted critic Roberta Silman for her unfavorable review in the Boston Globe. Writing on her Twitter account (in a post that has since been removed), Hoffman mourned the days when books were once reviewed by writers, calling Silman a "moron" and asking, "My second novel was reviewed by [Anne] Tyler. So who is Roberta Silman?"

Silman's fiction, however, has been published in The New Yorker. She has released three novels and a collection of short stories. And Hoffman's outburst has provoked only amusement from
Silman, a flood of support from readers, and an apology from Hoffman.

Silman's anger-inducing review praised Hoffman's earlier work while calling the latest novel "tired" and improvisational, a bit messy. Overall, the review was not very harsh or entirely negative.

Book Review: Shanghai Girls

Set in an extravagantly pseudo-Chinese neighborhood of Los Angeles in the 1930s, a "China City" that catered to white tourists by showcasing the most cutesy (and usually inaccurate) of oriental curiosities, Shanghai Girls by Chinese-American novelist Lisa See documents the hopes and disappointments of two sisters who flee Japanese war atrocities in Shanghai only to meet alienation and prejudice on the "golden mountain" of the United States.

Robert Fulford of the National Post reviews the novel, praising it for its cross-cultural examination, exploration of identity politics, and readability while criticizing its "unremarkable" prose.

Fulford writes:

Her female characters alternately support and resent each other, in ways that suggest she's tapped into the rich vein of narrative uncovered in recent decades by Chick Lit authors. At the same time, she serves as advocate and analyst of the Chinese experience; she writes Identity Fiction, running parallel to Identity Politics. She knows precisely how hard life on this continent was for the Chinese and how to spell out the damning historical evidence. Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, while sometimes called a West Coast equivalent of Ellis Island, appears in Shanghai Girls without a trace of sentiment: It's depicted as the place where Chinese would-be immigrants were harshly imprisoned while bureaucrats tried to send them back home.