African authors nab trio of book prizes

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This article was published 20/11/2021 (1414 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

African writers have won a triple crown of the world’s biggest literary prizes this year, with France’s Prix Goncourt the latest to go to a writer from the continent.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr won the French-language prize for La plus secrete mémoire des hommes, a coming-of-age novel about a young writer researching a mysterious poet known as “the black Rimbaud.”

The Goncourt doesn’t come with a big cheque; the winner gets a symbolic 10 Euros. But it does provide a big boost in sales. Last year’s winning book, L’Anomalie by Hervé Letellier, sold more than a million copies.

The Goncourt announcement followed the earlier prize wins by South Africa’s Damon Galgut, who won the Booker Prize for The Promise, his third book to be shortlisted for the honour, and Zanzibar-born Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for a career of books exploring the effects of colonialism and the experience of refugees and became the first black African to win the prize since Wole Soyinka in 1986.

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A single parent complaint caused a school division in a suburb of Wichita, Kan. to temporarily remove 29 books from school libraries. The books were returned to the libraries after a storm of national and international publicity.

According to the Wichita Eagle, the controversy began when a parent in the bedroom community of Goddard complained about the language in Angie Thomas’s best-selling young adult novel The Hate U Give, about a police shooting. The parent then added a list of books to the complaint, including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences, by August Wilson.

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University of Manitoba sociology and criminology professor Gregg Olsen examines poverty and homelessness in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. in Poverty and Austerity Amid Plenty: a Comparative Introduction.

He’ll discuss the book with Elizabeth Comack, a professor emerita of sociology and criminology and the U of M, on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers. The conversation will also be streamed to McNally Robinson’s YouTube page.

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A tale of magical multi-racial assassins working for the Mob in 1940s Harlem won the best novel prize this month in the World Fantasy Awards.

Trouble the Saints, by Alaya Dawn Johnson, has been compared to Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad for its combination of magic, history and exploration of the Black American experience.

In the best novella category, the winning book was Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, a story about the racism and Black American life featuring a main character with the power to see the future.

The best short story prize went to Aoko Matsuda, for Where the Wild Ladies Are, a collection of feminist retellings of Japanese folk tales.

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Indigenous writers across Canada hailed the late Lee Maracle this month as a key force in leading the development of Indigenous literature.

Maracle, who died Nov. 11, wrote more than a dozen books beginning in the 1970s, including novels (Celia’s Song), poetry collections (Hope Matters) and works of non-fiction (I am Woman), and taught at a number of universities.

Following her death, many of Canada’s most prominent Indigenous writers credited her inspiration and encouragement for the growth of Indigenous literature, including Joshua Whitehead, Waubgeshig Rice, Cherie Dimaline and Terese Mailhot.

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An illustrated story about a creepy science lab/pet store and a mouse-sized elephant is the big winner in this year’s Canadian Children’s Book Centre awards.

The Barnabus Project earned brothers Terry, Eric and Devin Fan the $50,000 TD Children’s Book Award.

The $20,000 Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award went to Jillian Tamaki for Our Little Kitchen, a children’s book set in a community kitchen. Other prizes went to Powwow: A Celebration Through Song and Dance by Karen Pheasant-Neganigwane; The Paper Girl of Paris by Jordyn Taylor; Facing the Sun by Janice Lynn Mather; and No Vacancy by Tziporah Cohen.

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