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Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles – Greek myths, women’s voices, and colonial violence
In “The Public Voice of Women”, the classicist Mary Beard writes about a text by Aristophanes: “Part of the joke was that women couldn’t speak properly in public – or rather, they couldn’t adapt their private speech […] to the lofty idiom of male politics”. Beard examines in her text how (Western) ideas…
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Moving Through the World (Happy?) Fat
Last year in July, I almost fainted when I saw Danish UK-based comedian Sofie Hagen perform in Berlin. Now my near collapsing wasn’t so much swooning – though Sofie Hagen might merit that – but due to being stuck in a very small, very hot, and pretty much void of oxygen venue. But…
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Women’s Prize for Fiction: My Personal Shortlist
Tonight at midnight the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist will be announced. So, a few hours left to be cheer for one’s favourite books on the list and guess what will actually make the cut. During the last two months, I have read (almost) all books of the longlist I had not yet read. Having…
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Podcast #3: Namwali Serpell
Namwali Serpell is an award-winning author and associate professor of English at UC Berkeley. Her first published story, “Muzungu,” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009, shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize. Five years later she won the Caine Prize with her story „The Sack“. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, was published in March to…
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April, May, June: 15(+) Most-Anticipated Books
The first quarter of 2019 is almost over and it is time to look into the next three month. There are so many fascinating books coming out – some by already well-loved authors and also super-interesting debuts. I share brief descriptions of each book (either from Goodreads or the publisher’s page, sometimes abridged)…
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5 Reasons Why I Loved Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift
In 2009, Namwali Serpell’s short story “Muzungu” published in Callaloo was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009 and a year later it was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing (a prize she would go on winning five years later). Now, this story – reworked – sits in the middle of Serpell’s…
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“All the ghosts of life/ assemble before us”
This March started with a bang for poetry. On the first day of the month, University Press of Nebraska published Tjawangwa Dema’s debut collection The Careless Seamstress and Mahtem Shiferraw’s sophomore collection Your Body is War as part of the African Poetry Book Series. Both poets are deeply invested in interrogating the ways women experience…
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The Great White Feminist Novel
On November 28th, Margaret Atwood wrote a tweet which excited many. Thirty years after the publications of her seminal dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (and during its successful run as a TV series), Atwood announced that she was writing a sequel: The Testaments will be published in September this year. It seems to be a good time for…
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Podcast #2: Musa Okwonga
Musa Okwonga is a poet, essayist, journalist, writer, and musician. His writing has appeared in several outlets. He has published two books on football – A Cultured Left Foot (2007) and Will You Manage? (2010) – as well as a poetry collection (Eating Roses for Dinner). Okwonga contributed to award-winning anthologies like The Good Immigrant (2016) and Change…
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Contemporary Queer Nigerian Writing
Over the last couple of years, I accumulated a fair amount of books (texts) from Nigeria/ by Nigerian and Nigerian diasporic authors which tackle queer themes and focus on LGBT+ protagonists. This list brings them together in one post. It is not to supposed to be a complete representation of everything ever published.…
