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My Best Books 2019
When I think about my reading year 2019, I first and foremost think about big, big books. For someone whose general preference lies with shorter books (250 pages just seems pretty ideal), I did pick up a lot of books going on 400 pages and far beyond – and in a lot of…
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Podcast #10: Panashe Chigumadzi
Panashe Chigumadzi is an essayist and novelist. Her first novel, Sweet Medicine, was published in 2015 (Blackbird Books) and won the K. Sello Duiker Literary Award in 2016. In 2018 her second book These Bones Will Rise Again was published as the first book of The Indigo Press. She is the founding editor of…
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Podcast #9: Ayesha Harruna Attah
Ayesha Harruna Attah is the writer of three novels. Her debut novel, Harmattan Rain, was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Africa Region. Her most recent novel, The Hundred Wells of Salaga, is a wonderful historical novel set in pre-colonial Ghana following two women whose fates intersect. This novel has been translated…
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October, November, December: 15(+) Most-Anticipated Books
October and November are brimfull with exciting releases and that’s why I focussed on these two months and less in December. But these two month have everything from stimulating theory over captivating memoirs to wonderfully strange stories. Like always, I share brief descriptions of each book (either from Goodreads or the publisher’s page,…
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Podcast #8: Safia Elhillo
Safia Elhillo is an award-winning poet who performs regularly and whose writing has been published in various journals and anthologies, the New Daugthers of Africa anthology just being one of the latest one. In 2016, her chapbook Asmarani was included in the New Generation African Poets Box Set. Her debut collection The January Children,…
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Podcast #7: Zeba Talkhani
Zeba Talkhani’s memoir My Past is a Foreign Country: A Muslim Feminist Finds Herself was published at the end of June and received blurbs by writers such as Meena Kandasamy and Ironesen Okojie. One of her previous essays, “The Difficulty in Being Good”, was part of the anthology Nasty Women. A Collection of…
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Podcast #6: Leslie Kuo
Leslie Kuo describes herself on her website as “a librarian, a designer, a translator, and both a first and second generation immigrant”. Currently she works at the Berlin-Pankow Public Library District. She is part of the management team and responsible for a programme on ‘intercultural opening’ (a term we discuss within the podcast).…
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July, August, September: 15(+) Most-Anticipated Books
The second half of 2019 began already a couple of days ago but I only now managed to finish my list of anticipated reads for July, August, and September. While July brings some really great publications, August and September promise to be unbelievably good book months. I could hardly choose which books to…
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A Month of Reading Exclusively Queer Literature – 50 Years After Stonewall
On the night from the 27th of June to 28th of June 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn at Christopher Street in New York City. The raid sparked resistance and a revolt against police violence over the following days. The exact sequence of events from these days and especially of the early morning…
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Podcast #5: Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s debut novel House of Stone was published in 2018 to much acclaim. It has been awarded the 2019 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize. Before the novel, Tshuma had…
