As the title of Natasha Brown’s debut novel suggests, it amounts to a coming-together, an assembling. A Black British woman attends a party for an upper-class white family. This celebration in rural England is the culmination of her inner dilemmas: has she made it or are her actions making her an accomplice to the racism she experiences? At this party, she makes up her mind.
In her latest book, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, Bernardine Evaristo reflects on her career. And what can I say? She knows her craft, and she knows how to present herself and her work in an extremely likeable way.
Since the beginning of 2021, we here at poco.lit. have been working on the macht.sprache. project with Kolja Lange and Timur Celikel. The project aims to foster politically sensitive translation. Our new browser extension will help achieve this goal.
Since Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, the Zanzibar-born author who lives in the UK has suddenly become known to mainstream audiences. Gurnah’s 2001 novel By the sea is about a dispute between two families that takes place against a backdrop of political change.
The Promise marks the third time a South African writer has won the Booker: Galgut joins fellow laureates Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee. The book is executed with a real skill for the craft of writing, and commands respect for the author’s handling of his medium.
Representations of dis/ability run through the literature of every era. It seems to be a particularly useful narrative device for writers who address colonial contexts and their consequences. At the same time, depicting dis/abled characters allows these authors to question the social and potentially colonial construction of dis/ability.
The Bone People, set on the South Island of New Zealand, is not always easy, but it’s absolutely worth the trouble. Over the course of reading it my relationship to it kept changing: from liking it, to hating it, to loving it; from wanting to redeem the characters, to loathing them, to taking them for what they were.