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African authors – writing for the world
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Gail Collins outlines the growth of African literature, from the 18th century to modern times.
In 1761, a small child, Phillis Wheatley (as renamed by the family she worked for) was captured and taken from her home in West Africa to Boston in the US. Fortunately, she landed in the arms of a benevolent family who taught her to read and write but they would have been totally unaware that this would lead her to become the first African to have work published in the UK and US with her collection of poetry –
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral – in 1773.
Reading recommendations from a pandemic year
Poets and politicians, sportsmen and theatre personalities look back at 2020 through the books they read Updated: December 20, 2020 12:12:44 pm
Here are the books authors read this year. (Source: Getty Images)
Aruni Kashyap
writer
I think everyone in India should read Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits (2020, Simon and Schuster) it is an urgent and topical book set in an India of the future, a work of speculative fiction. I don’t read a lot in this genre, but I think speculative fiction has the ability to
caution us.
I have long admired Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami’s fiction but Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America (2020, Pantheon) is my first introduction to her nonfiction writing. Through a set of essays, Lalami talks about what it means to be a Muslim-American citizen, a naturalised American citizen; and how acceptance by the establishment comes with some conditions. Read
âKent Stateâ On Top of PWâs 2020 Graphic Novel Critics Poll By PW Staff |
Released in September during the 50th anniversary year of the 1970 tragedy,
Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio (Abrams ComicArts) by veteran comics journalist Derf Backderf garnered the majority of votes in
PW’s annual Graphic Novel Critic’s Poll, receiving eight votes from a panel of 14 comics critics.
In this deeply researched work, Backderf, best known for his Eisner-nominated 2012 graphic nonfiction work
My Friend Dahmer, reconstructs the lives and last days of the student activists and bystanders killed when the National Guard fired on unarmed antiwar protesters on the campus of Kent State University. The book presents a nuanced portrait of the equally young National Guardsmen, who were under extreme pressure and suffered from a severe lack of training, while deftly examining the polarized political context, anti-communist paranoia, and rampant government surveilla