Petina Gappah and Brian Chikwava on the Orwell Book Prize Longlist.

Harare North and An Elegy for Easterly are among the books selected for the Orwell Prize longlist. Zinofadza zvomene. Good job Petina and Brian; you are challenging us (most of us), to write setasutswa. So straight to the source, here is a link to the full list: http://www.theorwellprize.co.uk/the-award/long-books.aspx

Here are the synopses of the two lovely books:

Harare North by Brian Chikwava

When he lands in Harare North, our unnamed protagonist carries nothing but a cardboard suitcase full of memories and an email address for his childhood friend, Shingi.Finessing his way through immigration, he spends a few restless weeks as the very unwelcome guest in his cousin’s home before tracking down Shingi in a Brixton squat.

In this astonishing, revelatory original debut, Caine Prize winner Brian Chikwava tackles head-on the realities of life as a refugee.This is the story of a stranger in a strange land – one of the thousands of illegal Zimbabwean immigrants seeking a better life in England - with a past he is determined to hide.From the first line the language fizzes with energy, humour and not a little menace.As he struggles to make his life in London (the ‘Harare North’ of the title) and battles with the weight of what he has left behind in a strife-torn Zimbabwe, every expectation and preconception (both his and ours) is turned on its head.The inhabitants of the squat function at various levels of desperation: Shingi struggles to find meaningful work and to meet the demands of his family back home; Tsitsi makes a living renting out her baby to women defrauding Social Services; Alex claims to have an important job in Croydon.


An Elergy for Eastery by Petina Gappah



A woman in a township in Zimbabwe is surrounded by throngs of dusty children but longs for a baby of her own; an old man finds that his job making coffins at No Matter Funeral Parlour brings unexpected riches; a politician’s widow quietly stands by at her husband’s funeral watching his colleagues bury an empty coffin. Petina Gappah’s characters may have ordinary hopes and dreams, but they are living in a world where a loaf of bread costs half a million dollars; a country expected to have only four presidents in a hundred years; and a place where people know exactly what will be printed in the one and only daily newspaper because the news is always, always good.

In her spirited debut collection, Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah brings us the resilience and inventiveness of the people who struggle to live under Robert Mugabe’s regime. Despite their circumstances, the characters in An Elegy for Easterly are more than victims; they are all too human, with as much capacity to inflict pain as they have to endure it. They struggle with larger issues common to all people everywhere: failed promises, unfulfilled dreams and the yearning for something to anchor them to life.

The Orwell Prize

The Orwell Prize is the pre-eminent British prize for political writing. There are three annual awards: a Book Prize, a Journalism Prize and a Blog Prize. They are awarded to the book, the journalism and the blogposts which are judged to have best achieved George Orwell’s aim to ‘make political writing into an art’. Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and Orwell’s incomparable essays still resonate around the world as peerless examples of courageous independence of mind, steely analysis and beautiful writing. READ MORE