Pule Lechesa (born 1976) is a black South African essayist, literary critic, poet, and publisher. His published books include Four Free State Authors (2005), The Evolution of Free State Black Literature (2006), and, Omoseye Bolaji...on Awards, Authors, Literature (2007). Pule Lechesa is the founder and main editor of Phoenix Press Publishers (in Ladybrand), which continues to publish sundry fiction, poetry, short stories, and criticism. His latest published books are Essays on Free State Black Literature (2012), Bolaji in his Pomp (2013), and A pennyfor Lechesa's Thoughts (2016).
Also a competent African sports writer, Lechesa was one of the football journalists who attended a FIFA-sponsored training session that took place in Nairobi, Kenya, in March 2010. He has since left a South African daily newspaper called The New Age to become a copy editor at Free State's largest weekly title, Public Eye Newspaper. In 2015, Pule Lechesa published a monograph on distinguished Sesotho writer K. P. D. Maphalla. [1] He is now the spokesperson for Mantsopa Municipality in South Africa.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a Kenyan author and academic, who has been described as "East Africa's leading novelist". He began writing in English, switching to write primarily in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal Mũtĩiri. His short story The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright has been translated into 100 languages.
Thomas Mokopu Mofolo is often regarded as the first African novelist. His body of work, which consists of three books composed between 1905 and 1910, were first written in Sesotho, and then widely translated.
Ladybrand is a small agricultural town in the Free State province of South Africa, situated 18 km from Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. Ladybrand is one of five towns that forms the Mantsopa Local Municipality. Founded in 1867 following the Basotho Wars, it was named after Lady (Catharina) Brand, the wife of the president of the Orange Free State, Johannes Brand.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. Olaudah Equiano was an African man who wrote The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, an autobiography published in 1789 that became one of the first influential works about the transatlantic slave trade and the experiences of enslaved Africans. His work was published sixteen years after Phillis Wheatley's work. She was an enslaved African woman who became the first African American to publish a book of poetry, which was published in 1773. Her collection, was titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
Peter Nazareth is a Ugandan literary critic and writer of fiction and drama.
Haki R. Madhubuti is an African-American author, educator, and poet, as well as a publisher and operator of black-themed bookstore. He is particularly recognized in connection with the founding in 1967 of Third World Press, considered the oldest independent black publishing house in the United States.
Omoseye Bolaji was a Nigerian writer who contributed to the growth of African literature in South Africa, especially in the Free State. Bolaji has been editor of South African publications including Free State News, Kopanang magazine, E and E magazine, and CHOICE magazine.
Miriam Tlali was a South African novelist. She was the first black woman in South Africa to publish an English-language novel, Muriel at Metropolitan, in 1975. She was also one of the first to write about Soweto. She also wrote Amandla in 1980 which focuses on the Soweto Uprising in 1976, as well as a collection of short stories called Soweto Stories which was published in 1989. Most of her writing was originally banned by the South African apartheid regime.
Jeffery Renard Allen is an American poet, essayist, short story writer and novelist. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits and Stellar Places, and four works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back, the story collection Holding Pattern a second novel, Song of the Shank, and his most recent book, the short story collection “Fat Time and Other Stories”. He is also the co-author with Leon Ford of “An Unspeakble Hope: Brutality, Forgiveness, and Building A Better Future for My Son”.
Zukiswa Wanner is a South African journalist, novelist and editor born in Zambia and now based in Kenya. Since 2006, when she published her first book, her novels have been shortlisted for awards including the South African Literary Awards (SALA) and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 2015, she won the K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award for London Cape Town Joburg (2014). In 2014, Wanner was named on the Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature.
Henry Chakava was a Kenyan publisher. He focused on the publication of books particularly in East Africa and has been described as "the father of Kenyan publishing" for being a pioneer publisher in Kenya who promoted free speech through literature. For his contribution to educational and cultural literature in East Africa, he received several awards.
Louis Decimus Rubin Jr. was a noted American literary scholar and critic, writing teacher, publisher, and writer. He is credited with helping to establish Southern literature as a recognized area of study within the field of American literature, as well as serving as a teacher and mentor for writers at Hollins College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and for founding Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a publishing company nationally recognized for fiction by Southern writers.
Kgotso Pieter David (K.P.D.) Maphalla was a writer in the Sesotho language. An author of more than 40 books, Maphalla has received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Free State, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award in Literature. Maphalla died on 5 April 2021 after suffering a stroke. He was laid to rest in Bohlokong, near Bethlehem on 14 April 2021.
Elieshi Lema is a Tanzanian writer and publisher, also active in Tanzania's civil society.
Brittle Paper is an online literary magazine styled as an "African literary blog" published weekly in the English language. Its focus is on "build(ing) a vibrant African literary scene." It was founded by Ainehi Edoro. Since its founding in 2010, Brittle Paper has published fiction, poetry, essays, creative nonfiction and photography from both established and upcoming African writers and artists in the continent and around the world. A member of The Guardian Books Network, it has been described as "the village square of African literature", as "Africa's leading literary journal", and as "one of Africa's most on the ball and talked-about literary publications". In 2014, the magazine was named a "Go-To Book Blog" by Publishers Weekly, who described it as "an essential source of news about new work by writers of color outside of the United States."
Ntšeliseng 'Masechele Khaketla was a pioneering Sesotho-language playwright, poet, short fiction writer, literary translator, and teacher from Lesotho. Khaketla achieved several notable firsts, including becoming the first Mosotho woman to earn a bachelor's degree when she graduated with a B.A. from University of Fort Hare in 1940. The following decade, Khaketla became the third published female Sesotho-language creative writer and the first published female Sesotho-language playwright with the appearance of her play Mosali eo u 'neileng eena (1954).
Moalosi Jacob Qoopane (1955–2017), also known as “Flaxman” was known as “the father of literature and arts” in Bloemfontein. Qoopane was a South African literary activist and internationally recognised author, poet, journalist and biographer.
Anne Walmsley is a British-born editor, scholar, critic and author, notable as a specialist in Caribbean art and literature, whose career spans five decades. She is widely recognised for her work as Longman's Caribbean publisher, and for Caribbean books that she authored and edited. Her pioneering school anthology, The Sun's Eye: West Indian Writing for Young Readers (1968), drew on her use of local literary material while teaching in Jamaica. A participant in and chronicler of the Caribbean Artists Movement, Walmsley is also the author of The Caribbean Artists Movement: A Literary and Cultural History, 1966–1971 (1992) and Art in the Caribbean (2010). She lives in London.
Irene Staunton is a Zimbabwean publisher, editor, researcher and writer, who has worked in literature and the arts since the 1970s, both in the UK and Zimbabwe. She is co-founder and publisher of Weaver Press in Harare, having previously co-founded Baobab Books. Staunton is the editor of several notable anthologies covering oral history, short stories, and poetry, including Mothers of the Revolution: War Experiences of Thirty Zimbabwean Women (1990), Children in our Midst: Voices of Farmworker's Children (2000), Writing Still: New Stories from Zimbabwe (2003), Women Writing Zimbabwe (2008), Writing Free (2011), and Writing Mystery & Mayhem (2015).
Daniel Pule Kunene (1923–2016) was a South African literary scholar, translator, and writer. He was Emeritus Professor of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
External links
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17358846W/A_PENNY_FOR_LECHESA'S_THOUGHTS