Literature of Africa

The poems in *82nd Division*, written in various forms including the villanelle, sonnet, blues poem, duplex, ode, and dramatic monologue, among many others, are collectively a love song to the author’s native Nigeria—a former British colony. In the book, whose title poem chronicles the lives of...

A number of distinguished Africans, representing a broad range of disciplines, ask what will the continent look like in 2057, a century on from independence in Ghana and Sudan. They set out to provide some "credible alternative visions," challenging the persistent image of Africa as a continent in...

'Achebe is the man who invented African literature because he was able to show, in the structure and language of *Things Fall Apart*, that the future of African writing did not lie in simple imitation of European forms but in the fusion of such forms with oral traditions,' says Professor Simon...

Chinua Achebe's award-winning poems are marked by a subtle richness and the political acuity and moral vision that are a signature of all of his work. Focused and powerful, and suffused with wisdom and compassion, *Collected Poems* is further evidence of this great writer's sublime gifts, and it is...

Told by nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is the Cain and Abel-esque story of a childhood in Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his absence to skip school and go...

Award-winning writer Ben Okri, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road, curates this one-volume overview of the best of African literature. Here is a pantheon of enormous talents from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, hailing from a wide variety of countries and cultures...

A house gun, like a house cat: a fact of ordinary daily life. How else can you defend yourself against intruders and thieves in post-apartheid South Africa? The respected executive director of an insurance company, Harald, and his doctor wife, Claudia, are faced with something that could never...

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe—author of *Things Fall Apart*, one of the towering works of twentieth-century fiction—is considered the father of modern African literature. The equally revered Toni Morrison, author of masterworks such as *Beloved* and one of only four Americans to receive the Nobel...

The Nobel Prize–winning author Nadine Gordimer tells the emotional story of two couples, one black and one white, whose complex relationships evolve as they face the hazards and hopes of post-apartheid South Africa.

In an Ivory Coast village where Christians and Muslims are squaring off for war, against a backdrop of bloody conflict and vibrant African life, Jack Diaz—an American relief worker—and Mamadou, his village guardian, learn that hate knows no color and that true heroism waits where we least expect...

Freedom is the most precious commodity in the world. In this powerful collection, the celebrated novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet Ben Okri explores the beauty contained in each one of us—the freedom of our spirit, the child within. He recalls the death of his father, the sacrifices of his...