Penguin SA

Ringing laughter is what most guests will remember from the launch of Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them. Visiting South Africa for the Time of the Writer Festival, Akpan was able to make time for his Joburg fans at the Nelson Mandela Square Exclusive Books this week. Akpan, a Catholic priest, delighted launch guests with his self-deprecating attitude and genuine warmth.

Say You’re One of Them is, of course, the collection of short stories that caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey, who made it one of her Book Club selections. Akpan says the resulting attention has allowed him to travel around the world – mostly through writers’ festivals invites. He speaks of writing as a “gift” – something that he needed to appreciate by acting on. When writing his book, he was often at the mercy of Nigeria’s on again, off again electricity supply, but he persevered. He wrote mainly at night on local computers while attending to his seminary studies and parishioners during the day. Asked for advice by an aspiring author in the audience, he said, “If you want to write, write!”. He said that a writer must be “ready to sit alone in that room, tell their friends not to visit and stay in that space”. Saying he “stumbled” upon his gift, he spent many years developing it including going to a writers’ school.

During the launch he said he’d originally aspired to be a columnist, writing a package of 4 opinion pieces which he sent off to various newspapers to try his luck. Feeling down and depressed when he didn’t receive a positive response, he eventually tried fiction – asking himself, “What do I have to lose?”. He was lucky, with several publishers keen to pick up his work. As a newly developing author he shared how he balked initially at being published because he didn’t feel he was ready. Finally, a year later, his short story, “My Parents’ Bedroom”, was published.

Asked how real the stories he writes are to him he replied that first he writes, then he researches. For him, “research is not the story”. But he does spend time sending his work out for comments and feedback, particularly when it comes to checking cultural details and honouring the local dialogue or “patois”. It is clear that although not biographical, the stories and children he writes about move him greatly. “I intentionally wanted to write about things that bothered me,” he said. For the future, he would love to write a novel but that is something he will need to learn how to do.

It was clear that the crowd at this launch – which comprised people from all over the world, as it happened – were only too happy to enjoy a touch of the Oprah magic that now surrounds Father Uwem Akpan.

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• Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan
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  EAN: 9780349120645
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Exclusive Books and Penguin Books take pleasure in inviting you to the launch of A Million Miles from Normal by Paige Nick. See you there!

About the book

Rachel Marcus has a great life and an amazing job as a top copywriter at an advertising agency in Johannesburg, or rather Rachel Marcus HAD a great life and an amazing job as a top copywriter at an advertising agency in Johannesburg – right up until she got fired …

Forced to sell everything she owns and leave Joburg in a hurry, Rachel moves to New York City where she plans to make a fabulous life for herself and prove to everyone back home that she’s not a complete disaster. Except that the only job she can find is at a crap advertising agency, with a hippie freak for a boss and an alcoholic drug addict for an art director. And the only apartment she can afford is the world’s smallest cockroach-infested rat trap. In fact, the only upside to her new life in the Big Apple is her new best friend – her frustratingly petite neighbour, Sue.

However, just when things seem to be going from bad to worse Rachel meets the oh-so delicious Jerrod Craig. And not only does Jerrod have all his own teeth but he is also Creative Group Head at one of the biggest advertising agencies in New York. Suddenly it looks like Rachel’s life might just be coming together – a handsome boyfriend with all the right connections can put a silver lining on any cloud. Now all she needs is that cup of tea…

Event Details

• Date: Thursday, 25 March 2010
• Time: 6:00 PM for 6:30 PM
• Venue: Exclusive Books Constantia Village,
  Spaanschemat Road
  Constantia
• RSVP: To Exclusive Books Constantia Village, by 19 March,
  constantia@exclusivebooks.co.za, 021 794 7800

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• A Million Miles from Normal by Paige Nick
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  EAN: 9780143026518
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In A Million Miles from Normal, Rachel Marcus has a great life and an amazing job as a top copywriter at an advertising agency in Johannesburg, or rather Rachel Marcus HAD a great life and an amazing job as a top copywriter at an advertising agency in Johannesburg – right up until she got fired …

Forced to sell everything she owns and leave Joburg in a hurry, Rachel moves to New York City where she plans to make a fabulous life for herself and prove to everyone back home that she’s not a complete disaster. Except that the only job she can find is at a crap advertising agency, with a hippie freak for a boss and an alcoholic drug addict for an art director. And the only apartment she can afford is the world’s smallest cockroach-infested rat trap. In fact, the only upside to her new life in the Big Apple is her new best friend – her frustratingly petite neighbour, Sue.

However, just when things seem to be going from bad to worse Rachel meets the oh-so delicious Jerrod Craig. And not only does Jerrod have all his own teeth but he is also Creative Group Head at one of the biggest advertising agencies in New York. Suddenly it looks like Rachel’s life might just be coming together – a handsome boyfriend with all the right connections can put a silver lining on any cloud. Now all she needs is that cup of tea…

• To see a commercial for A Million Miles from Normal, click here

About the author

Paige Nick has been a copywriter in advertising for 15 years, where she has worked on brands like BMW, Nashua, Kulula.com, Levi’s Jeans and Allan Gray. A Million Miles from Normal is 99% fictional, although many of the characters are an amalgamation of the people Paige has worked with and clients she has met over the years. This is her first novel.

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• A Million Miles from Normal by Paige Nick
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  EAN: 9780143026518
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A young man makes three journeys that take him through Greece, India and Africa. He travels lightly, simply. To those who travel with him and those whom he meets on the way – including a handsome, enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers and a woman on the edge – he is the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian. Yet, despite the man’s best intentions, each journey ends in disaster. Together, these three journeys will change his whole life.

A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, In a Strange Room is the hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man’s search for love, and a place to call home.

“The Lover”, one of the three parts that make up In a Strange Room, has been chosen for “The O Henry Award” – the only annual award, in the United States, given to short stories of exceptional merit.

About the author

Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria in 1963. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was seventeen. His other books include Small Circle of Beings, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, The Quarry, The Good Doctor and The Impostor. The Good Doctor was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Dublin/IMPAC Award. The Impostor won the 2008 University of Johannesburg Prize for Creative Writing, and was shortlisted for the 2009 M-Net Literary Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the African Region. He lives in Cape Town.

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• In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
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  EAN: 9780143026273
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A message from Penguin Books CEO Alison Lowry:

Penguin Books has been both delighted and overwhelmed at the response we received for the Penguin Prize for African Writing. We received an unanticipated number of entries: around 250 manuscripts were submitted for the Fiction award and 50 for the Non-Fiction award, most of which were received just before the cut off date at the end of January. Entries have come from countries all across Africa, including Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Malawi and South Africa.

In our search for the best writing out of Africa, and in light of the astonishing number of entries received, Penguin Books had to extend the assessment time for manuscripts. The announcement of the shortlist will therefore take place in June 2010 and will be displayed on our website. The winners will still be announced in September.

We have been thrilled with the tremendous response to this inaugural prize and wish to express our sincere gratitude to all the writers from across the African continent who put fingertips to keyboards and hit the “send” button in order to get their manuscripts to us on deadline.

Exclusive Books and Penguin Books take pleasure in inviting you to come and meet Uwem Akpan.

His book of short stories, Say You’re One of Them, is Oprah Winfreys’ latest book club selection and the winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in the Africa region.

Akpan’s extraordinary stories centre on African conflicts as seen through the eyes of children and describes their resilience and endurance in heartbreaking detail. From child trafficking to inter-religious conflicts, the author reveals in beautiful prose the resilience and endurance of children faced with the harsh consequences of deprivation and terror.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Event Details

• Date: Tuesday, 16 March 2010
• Time: 6:00 PM for 6:30 PM
• Venue: Exclusive Books, Mandela Square, Shop 111, Upper Level
  Mandela Square
  Sandton, Johannesburg | Map
• RSVP: thesquare@exclusivebooks.co.za, 011 784 5416

Book Details

• Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan
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  EAN: 9780349120645
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“…usually short stories leave you wanting something and you’re like, huh, what happened?… “This is a first for me because
each one of these five stories really just left me gasping. Just an incredible book.”

– Oprah Winfrey

2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize winner and Oprah Book Club author Uwem Akpan will be visiting South Africa this month, giving press interviews and attending the Time of the Writer in Durban.

If you’re in Durban from 9 – 13 March, don’t miss your chance to get to know a stunning new voice on the African writing scene.

About the book

Uwem Akpan’s stunning stories humanise the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few readers will feel they’ve ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of “An Ex-Mas Feast” needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can’t be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.

In the second of his stories, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences of life for children in Africa.

Akpan’s voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent.

About the author

Uwem Akpan was born in the village of Ikot Akpan Eda in southern Nigeria. After studying philosophy and English at Creighton and Gonzaga universities, he studied theology for three years at the Catholic University of East Africa. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003 and received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. “My Parents’ Bedroom”, a story included in this, his first collection, was one of five short stories by African writers chosen as finalists for the Caine Prize for African Writing. In 2007 Akpan began a teaching assignment at a Jesuit college in Harare, Zimbabwe.

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• Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan
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  EAN: 9780349120645
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Photo courtesy Luke Coppen @ Wordpress

Jennifer Crocker learns that Mark Behr’s ambition was to write a “plaasroman [farm novel] for the 21st century” with Kings of the Water – and that it’s a book that works in profound ways with Behr’s sense of South African self:

Behr lives in the US but is intimately linked to South Africa. He says he lives openly as a gay man, so there is the temptation to assume Michiel Steyn [his main character] is Behr.

Michiel is a gay man. He has fled Paradys (Paradise) after an incident during his military service which “disgraced” him, and ends up living in the US. In the act of being himself he has betrayed the Afrikaner image of what a man is and so is cast out, ostensibly by his father but also, it seems, by himself.

Behr says: “At heart it is a book about the fluidity of life and the inevitability of change – personal, political, psychological, environmental, discursive – and the foolishness (and danger) of all kinds of certitude and of trying to control what cannot be controlled.

• Complete article in the Sunday Times

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• Kings of the Water by Mark Behr
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  EAN: 9780349113708
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The critically acclaimed Commonwealth Writers’ Prize is in its 24th year and has a strong track record of discovering new international stars. It offers an exceptional opportunity for new writers to demonstrate their talent and for authors already on the literary scene to strengthen their reputation. Authors across Africa are in pole position to compete with some of the best authors from the Caribbean and Canada, South Asia and Europe, and South East Asia and the Pacific to win the coveted prizes of the Commonwealth’s Best Book and Best First Book.

The main purpose of the prize is to encourage and reward the upsurge of new Commonwealth fiction and ensure that works of merit reach a wider audience outside their country of origin.

This year Penguin Books is proud to announce that four Penguin books have been shortlisted to win the coveted prizes of the Commonwealth’s Best Book and Best First Book. These books will now go through to the next phase of the competition, where the African regional judging panel will meet to decide the two regional Commonwealth winners for Best Book and Best First Book. The regional winners will be announced at an event on 11 March in Johannesburg.

The shortlisted books from the Penguin Group are as follows:

Best Book (Africa Region)

Kings of the Water by Mark Behr (Little, Brown)

When Michiel Steyn returns to the family farmstead in South Africa for his mother’s funeral, he has spent close to half his lifetime abroad. But even after fifteen year’s absence, neither Michiel nor those he left behind have truly come to terms with his terrible flight from the farm they called Paradise. As Michiel submits himself to the rituals of mourning and remembrance in the small town and on the land where he became a man, all that has lain undisturbed for years is brought to light. A father’s implacable fury and a brother’s violent death, the loss of a child, the betrayal of love and the ugly memory of the dying days of apartheid all come between the prodigal and forgiveness.

Tsamma Season by Rosemund J Handler (Penguin SA)

Tsamma Season is set in the late 1800s. An intrepid couple spurn their former lives to take on the challenge of building a home in the Kalahari Desert. The family’s story is told by their precocious daughter, Emma. Born and raised in the desert, Emma’s love for the haunting isolation of her home, and for the singular people and animals with whom she shares it, becomes the driving force of her life’s journey.

Best First Book (Africa Region)

Jelly Dog Days by Erica Emdon (Penguin SA)

Growing up in a working-class family in the 1960s and ‘70s, with her narcissistic and neglectful mother, Lizette, and her stepfather, Piet, a construction worker who spends much of his time away from home, Terry learns early on that childhood, at least for her, is a matter of survival. Those who are meant to protect and care for her increasingly exploit her, and as she watches her mother drag herself to and from her job at Harry’s Dry Cleaner’s each day, then sink into alcoholism and eventually relinquish all parental responsibility, it is left to Terry to become the caregiver and protector of her four younger siblings. The only real affection she is shown comes from the family’s nanny Sophie, with whom she forms a strong bond, and from Piet who, while proving to be the more attentive parent, nevertheless exacts a high price for his affection.

Sleeper’s Wake by Alistair Morgan (Penguin SA)

Winner of the 2009 Plimpton Prize. When forty-six year old John Wraith regains consciousness after the horrific car accident that claims the lives of his wife and daughter, he is adrift, bewildered and deeply traumatised. He takes up the offer of time to recuperate in Nature’s Valley, and it is here that his path crosses that of a damaged family in retreat from their own horrific trauma. John’s uneasy involvement with this trio and particularly with Jackie, for whom he feels a confusing mixture of protectiveness and sexual attraction, provides the novel with its driving narrative and, ultimately, its shocking conclusion. Written in lucid, often beautiful prose, Sleeper’s Wake is a haunting study of man at his most vulnerable.

Book details

• Kings of the Water by Mark Behr
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  EAN: 9780349113708
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• Tsamma Season by Rosemund Handler
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  EAN: 9780143025849
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• Jelly Dog Days by Erica Emdon
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  EAN: 9780143025108
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• Sleeper’s Wake by Alistair Morgan
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  EAN: 9780143025962
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John van de Ruit se geliefde karakter Spud het onlangs ‘n gesig gekry. Troye Sivan, ‘n 14-jarige seun, oorspronklik van Suid-Afrika, gaan die rol van Spud in speel in ‘n nuwe fliek gebasseer op die Spud-boeke. Terwyl almal wag vir die fliek om verfilm te word moet ons onself maar vergryp aan die oulike reeks boeke: Spud, Spud:The Madness Continues en Spud:Learning to Fly Limited Edition.

John van de Ruit, skrywer van die skreeusnaakse Spud-boeke, sê hy het die “gil-nuus” ontvang dat die Suid-Afrikaans gebore Troye Sivan die rol van Spud in die fliek sal speel.

John Cleese, bekende Monty Python-akteur van Brittanje, het intussen ook “sover gekom om die kontrak vir die rol van The Guv te teken”, sê Van de Ruit.

Die 14-jarige Troye, wat saam met sy ouers uit Suid-Afrika na Perth, Australië, geëmigreer het, het in 2008 sy groot deurbraak gemaak toe hy as Young Logan (Hugh Jackman se karakter op 12) vir X-Men Origins: Wolverine gekies is.

• Lees die volledige artikel in Die Burger

Boekbesonderhede

• Spud deur John van de Ruit
  Boektuisblad
  EAN: 9780143024842
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• Spud: The madness continues deur John van de Ruit
  Boektuisblad
  EAN: 9780143025207
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• Spud: Learning to Fly Limited Edition deur John van Ruit
  Boektuisblad
  EAN: 9780143026259
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Foto te dank aan Volksblad