WEALTH OF IDEAS

The announcement just came in. "We Need New Names" by NoViolet Bulawayo, is now on the Booker Prize Shortlist. The list is strong and diverse. We Need New Names  by NoViolet Bulawayo  (Chatto & Windus) The Luminaries  by Eleanor Catton (Granta) The Harvest  by Jim Crace  (Picador) The Lowland  by Jhumpa Lahiri  (Bloomsbury) A Tale for the Time Being  by Ruth Ozeki  (Canongate) The Testament of Mary  by Colm Tóibín  (Penguin) "The six books on the list could not be more diverse. There are examples from novelists from New Zealand, England, Canada, Ireland and Zimbabwe – each with its own highly distinctive taste. They range in size from the 832 pages of Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries to the 104-page The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín. The times represented stretch from the biblical Middle East (Tóibín) to contemporary Zimbabwe (NoViolet Bulawayo) by way of 19th-century New Zealand (Catton), 1960s India (Jumpha L...

In September, 2007, I complained about why the people who nominate writers for prizes were not nominating Ngugi for the Nobels, Bookers, Man Bookers and others. In a post entitled "Ngugi wa Thiongo and These Literary Awards", I talked about how I thought his works deserve recognition, that his commitment to African literature and to translation was worth something along the lines of these big prizes. And I was serious. So now I am just thrilled to see his name as one of the contenders for the 2009 Man Booker Prize, which Achebe won in 2007. Just the other day I was rereading Petals of Blood , and told myself I need to re-read all of Ngugi. I haven't read Ngugi outside of Africa, so I feel I may have a different (I don't know) understanding of his works. Like how Marechera's works resonated to me differently reading them here than when I had read them in Zimbabwe, finding out there was more that I could relate with in works like The Black Insider , or if there was ...