After weeks of trying to stream the pandemic away, maybe you’re realizing that there is nothing like a good novel to truly escape the constraints of time and space. Your “To Read” stack is glaring at you from its neglected spot on the shelf while your old friends are crying out to be read again, […]
Tag Archives: things fall apart
Petina Gappah Translates the First Three Paragraphs of Things Fall Apart Into Shona
Earlier this year, Petina Gappah tweeted her translation into Shona of the first three paragraphs of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. To date, the novel has been translated into at least sixty-one languages. Within the African continent itself, Things Fall Apart has been translated into Afrikaans, Ganda, Northern Soto, Setswana, Swahili, Xhosa, Yoruba, and Zulu. To date, […]
They Say There are Over 50 Translations of Things Fall Apart. Here are 61.
How many times have you heard or read that Things Fall Apart has been translated into over 50 languages? And yet, do you know just exactly how many there are, or what the titles of the translations are, or who translated them? For #ChinuaAchebeWeek, on what would’ve been Achebe’s 89th birthday, we bring you all the […]
Novels by Achebe, Adichie, Okri, Gyasi, & Coetzee Make BBC’s List of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World
In 2018, BBC Culture polled literary experts around the world to “nominate up to five fictional stories they felt had shaped mindsets or influenced history.” They received responses from 108 writers, critics, journalists, academics, and translators from 35 countries, who selected novels, folk tales, poetry, and dramas in 33 different languages. We ran a piece […]
African Writers Series’ Classics Now Available for Affordable Downloads on OkadaBooks
In 1962, four years after the successful publication of Things Fall Apart, its British publishers Heinemann Educational Books began the African Writers Series (AWS)—a series of books by African writers packaged to give international voice to the continent’s literature in English. The series published paperback books by most of the major voices of the day: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Steve […]
The Magic of Things Fall Apart
Sometime in April, I received an email from the BBC Culture’s editor to nominate five stories that I believed had “the most impact on shaping ideas and changing minds through history.” The same invitation had been sent to other writers, critics, and academic the world over. 108 people from 35 countries responded, including myself. On […]
Things Fall Apart, Song Of Lawino, Nervous Conditions Among BBC’s Top 100 Stories That Shaped the World | How African Experts Voted
In April, BBC Culture polled literary experts around the world to “nominate up to five fictional stories they felt had shaped mindsets or influenced history,” and got answers from 108 writers, critics, journalists, academics, and translators from 35 countries, who selected novels, folk tales, poetry, and dramas in 33 different languages. After the final tabulation, three […]
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