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The late great Kenyan writer produced full-length work in all genres except poetry, capturing the tensions between colonizer and colonized, orality and literacy, and tradition and modernity.

The novelist, playwright, and theorist left a blistering legacy. He was, with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, regarded as part of an unofficial trinity: the continent’s greatest pioneering writers.

The judges called the Kenyan author a “transformative figure in African Literature.”

The revered Kenyan, who writes in Gikuyu, is also the prize’s first nominee as both author and translator of the same book.

Since the 1950s, the Nobel laureate has worked in rebellion, carving out a complex, fecund torque of an oeuvre. But as his plays of mythic vigor and Yoruba impulse revitalized Anglophone theatre, raising an art form to ritualistic heights, his force of personality kept him in the political arena, a close witness of an African affliction. Few artists have lived like him. Yet at 91, carrying the mantle of “greatest living writer,” he has one more great battle on his hands — with generations who once deified him.

He inherited the drama of the gods and became the greatest living writer. But at 91, in the long rage of Nigerian nationhood, his deep political legacy is at a crossroads.

From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Laila Lalami, and Goretti Kyomuhendo to Tochi Eze, Chisom Okafor, Itiola Jones, and Adedayo Agarau: the anticipated books of 2025.

As Series Editors of Global Black Writers in Translation, Vanessa K. Valdés, Anette Joseph-Gabriel, and Nathan H. Dize know that “Black literature is the least translated.” In a mostly white field, the long histories of Afro-diasporic, Caribbean, Spanish, French, and Portuguese erasures inform their work.

Centred on his former Ibadan residence, family memories of a young militant Wole Soyinka casts strange light on his increasingly contentious legacy as an activist.

In Between Starshine and Clay, the novelist interviews Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and Wole Soyinka, among other major Black figures in the arts and politics. “One of the things that was the most surprising was the actual extent to which they forged their own path,” she said.

From Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ben Okri, and Leila Aboulela to Sarah Ladipo Manyika and Ayobami Adebayo, here are the over 100 books expected to lead the literary conversation this year.

Other African writers participating include Laila Lalami, Ousman Umar, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Leila Slimani.

For many writers and artists in the continent, the Motswana shaman, poet, scriptwriter, editor, and interviewer is a go-to for deep conversations. What she does is “about consciousness,” going “into the realm of memory.”

“It’s not just about developing platforms for African poets. What is the bigger picture?” asks the Nigerian poet and editor of the collective. “We are thinking of training, models that feed capacity, that enhance their craft and careers.”

The production of the novel, which is about brown envelope journalism, is led by two Nollywood companies, Royal Arts Academy and Closer Pictures.

Since the 1980s, 106 African authors and 269 titles have been translated into the Chinese. Here, an insider provides an overview of the last two years, and a preview of 2022.

In awarding the Tanzanian novelist, short story writer, critic, and former academic, the Swedish Academy recommends these.

The prolific 73-year-old, whose latest is the novel Afterlives, has been awarded “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

“Only one universal ideology answers human cruelties, the excesses of power, bigotries, social inequalities and alienation: Literature,” wrote Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature, who turned 87 this week.