Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
Moyez G. Vassanji is a Canadian novelist and editor, who writes under the name M. G. Vassanji. Vassanji's work has been translated into several languages. As of 2020, he has published nine novels, as well as two short-fiction collections and two nonfiction books. Vassanji's writings, which have received considerable critical acclaim, often focus on issues of colonial history, migration, diaspora, citizenship, gender and ethnicity.
The African Writers Series (AWS) is a collection of books written by African novelists, poets and politicians. Published by Heinemann, 359 books appeared in the series between 1962 and 2003.
Following Tanganyika's independence (1961) and unification with Zanzibar (1964), leading to the formation of the state of Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere emphasised a need to construct a national identity for the citizens of the new country. To achieve this, Nyerere provided what has been regarded by some commentators as one of the most successful cases of ethnic repression and identity transformation in Africa.
African literature is literature from Africa, either oral ("orature") or written in African and Afro-Asiatic languages. Examples of pre-colonial African literature can be traced back to at least the fourth century AD. The best-known is the Kebra Negast, or "Book of Kings."
Fred D'Aguiar is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright of Portuguese descent. He is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Ubba was a 9th-century Viking and one of the commanders of the Great Heathen Army that invaded Anglo-Saxon England in the 860s. The Great Army appears to have been a coalition of warbands drawn from Scandinavia, Ireland, the Irish Sea region and Continental Europe. There is reason to suspect that a proportion of the Viking forces specifically originated in Frisia, where some Viking commanders are known to have held fiefdoms on behalf of the Franks. Some sources describe Ubba as dux of the Frisians, which could be evidence that he also associated with a Frisian benefice.
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Desertion is a 2005 novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah. It was published in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing.
Up to the second half of the 20th century, Tanzanian literature was primarily oral. Major oral literary forms include folktales, poems, riddles, proverbs, and songs. The majority of the oral literature in Tanzania that has been recorded is in Swahili, though each of the country's languages has its own oral tradition. The country's oral literature is currently declining because of social changes that make transmission of oral literature more difficult and because of the devaluation of oral literature that has accompanied Tanzania's development. Tanzania's written literary tradition has produced relatively few writers and works; Tanzania does not have a strong reading culture, and books are often expensive and hard to come by. Most Tanzanian literature is orally performed or written in Swahili, and a smaller number of works have been published in English. Major figures in Tanzanian modern literature include Shaaban Robert, Muhammed Said Abdulla, Aniceti Kitereza, Ebrahim Hussein, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Penina Muhando.
Christopher Michael "Zithulele" Mann was a South African poet.
Paradise is a historical novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Zanzibar-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, first published in 1994 by Hamish Hamilton in London. The novel was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction.
Mine Boy is a 1946 novel by South African novelist Peter Abrahams. Set in racist South Africa during the lead-up to apartheid, the novel explores the stereotypes and institutions that discriminate against working-class black Africans. According to Nigerian scholar Kolawole Ogungbesan, Mine Boy became "the first African novel written in English to attract international attention."
A World of Strangers is a 1958 novel by South African novelist and Nadine Gordimer. The novel included mixed reviews, drawing criticism for its pedantic explanation of Gordimer's worldview. The novel was banned in South Africa for 12 years.
Hard Punishments, also sometimes referred to as Cather's Avignon story, is the final, unpublished, and since lost novel by Willa Cather, almost entirely destroyed following her death in 1947. It is set in medieval Avignon.
By the Sea is a novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah. It was first published in the United States by The New Press on 11 June 2001 and in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing in May 2001. It is Gurnah's sixth novel. By the Sea was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Admiring Silence is a 1996 novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah. It is Gurnah's fifth novel and was first published by The New Press on 1 November 1996.
Pilgrims Way is a novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, first published in 1988 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom. It is Gurnah's second novel.
Memory of Departure is a novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, first published in 1987 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom. It is Gurnah's first novel. It follows a Muslim man in an unnamed African country who seeks to be educated abroad.
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Tanzanian-born British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah who the Swedish Academy members praised "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents." The winner was announced on October 7, 2021, by Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.
