Finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been announced. The Ethiopian novelist Maaza Mengiste is nominated in the Fiction category for her second novel The Shadow King, which is set during the second Italo-Ethiopian war and centers on women who fought in it. The Zambian novelist Namwali Serpell is nominated in the Ray […]
Tag Archives: The Old Drift
The Top 15 Debut Books of 2019
The year 2019 was full. While it is gone, its books are not. In December, we released our list of The Notable Books of 2019 by African authors. As we look ahead into 2020, we list the year’s most notable debuts books and authors in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, some of which also appear in […]
The 2019 Brittle Paper Award for Essays & Think Pieces: Meet The 5 Finalists
The 5 Shortlists for The 2019 Brittle Paper Awards were announced in November. Begun in 2017 to mark our seventh anniversary, the Awards aim to recognize the finest, original pieces of writing by Africans published online. READ: The 2017 Brittle Paper Award for Essays & Think Pieces: Meet the Finalists READ: The 2018 Brittle Paper Award for […]
Is There a Quota of 5 Books by African Authors for Every “Best 100 Books of 2019” List?
As yet another year draws to a close, literary lists of various sorts are once again filling our newsfeeds. During the first week of November 2019, BBC Arts released a list titled “100 Novels That Shaped Our World.” On that list, Brittle Paper noted that there were five novels by African authors which, in the words […]
Namwali Serpell & Tope Folarin Longlisted for Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift and Tope Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man have been longlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, “awarded to the best debut novel of the year.” Both writers won the Caine Prize, in 2015 and 2013, respectively. Serpell’s novel has been a massive hit with critics, with […]
Namwali Serpell on Using a Swarm of Mosquitoes as Narrator in Her New Novel, The Old Drift
Namwali Serpell’s debut novel The Old Drift has been a hit with critics. Hailed as the Great Zambian Novel and reviewed for The New York Times Review of Books by Salman Rushdie, it has been high on reading lists. Recently, the UC Berkeley associate professor of literature was featured on the podcast Reading Women, a […]
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