Essential African Novels & Novelists PDF

Essential African Novels and Novelists 1. Chinua Achebe It’s impossible to talk about African literature without mentioning Chinua Achebe. His two best-known books, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, have left a lasting mark on literature from the continent. Achebe’s work is a...

Essential African Novels and Novelists 1. Chinua Achebe It’s impossible to talk about African literature without mentioning Chinua Achebe. His two best-known books, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, have left a lasting mark on literature from the continent. Achebe’s work is a long reflection on colonialism and its consequences for individuality and the identity of Africans who are torn between two worlds — traditional and Western society — that they can’t fully belong to. He is one of the most famous African writers, and many expected him to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature. Unfortunately, he didn’t receive the award before his death in 2013. 2. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is only 42 years old, but she’s already recognized as one of the most significant African writers of her generation. Born and raised in Nigeria before studying in the United States, Adichie started her career to some acclaim with Purple Hibiscus. But it was her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, that cemented her reputation as a writer. She followed that with Americanah, which tackled issues of racism, feminism, and cultural uprooting with humor and self-derision. While best-known as a fiction writer, her short essay We Should All Be Feminists is also popular, and is distributed yearly to every high schooler in Sweden. In 2017, Fortune magazine ranked Adichie as one of the 50 most influential people in the world. 3. Ngugi wa Thiong’o Ngugi wa Thiongʼo is a Kenyan author whose works are written in English and the Kikuyu language. He’s currently professor and director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California. Ngugi is a prominent intellectual figure in East Africa. At the center of his work, you will find denunciations of colonialism, tensions between Black and white people, and communities torn between European and African cultural influence. From his very first novel, Weep Not, Child, Ngugi touches on these topics through the eyes of the insurgent Kikuyu rebelling against English authorities. But it’s A Grain of Wheat, published in 1967, that gained him international renown. After decades writing novels in English, Ngugi’s 1986 essay Decolonising the Mind is a farewell to the language: “How was it possible that we, African writers, exercised such weakness in defending our own languages and such greed in claiming foreign languages, starting with those of our colonizers?” Now, Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes only in his native language, Kikuyu, to reach the audience he wants to address first and foremost. 4. Wole Soyinka In a list of the best African writers it would be easy to mention any of the four who have won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Nadine Gordimer, Naguib Mahfouz, J.M. Coetzee, or Wole Soyinka from Nigeria. It has to be noted that Wole Soyinka was the very first African writer to receive this award. Wole Soyinka is a prolific author who’s written novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, poetry, and numerous theatrical plays. His famous works were Death and the King;s Horseman and The Nobel committee specifically called out the richness of Soyinka’s universe that “with a cultural and poetical perspective, models the drama of human existence.” 5. Alain Mabanckou Alain Mabanckou is a French-Congolese writer and a professor of French literature at the University of California. He became known in 1998 with his first novel, Bleu-Blanc-Rouge, for which he received the Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire — one of the major literary prizes for French-language literature in Africa. Mabanckou’s novel Verre cassé (Broken Glass), which recounts the lives of the regulars in a bar in Brazzaville, made him a well-known name among the general public. But it’s mostly Mémoires de porc-épic (Memoirs of a Porcupine), longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and the winner of the 2006 Prix Renaudot, which gave him public exposure as a prominent contemporary African writer. He also published the exceptional essay Dictionnaire enjoué des cultures africaines (“Joyful Dictionary of African Cultures”) in collaboration with Djibouti novelist Abdourahman Waberi. 6. Sol Plaatje Sol Plaatje was a political activist and intellectual fighting for the freedom of native Africans during colonization by both the British and the Dutch. Plaatje was in many ways a forefather for Nelson Mandela, and Native Life in South Africa is one of the most important works in African literature. In it, Plaatje makes an emotional plea for enfranchisement and basic human rights for black Africans suffering at the hands of colonialism. 6. Tendai Huchu Tendai Huchu who also writes as T. L. Huchu is a Zimbabwean author, best known for his novels The Hairdresser of Harare (2010) and The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician (2014). Tendai Huchu's first novel, The Hairdresser of Harare, was released in 2010 to critical acclaim, and has been translated into German, French, Italian and Spanish. His short fiction in multiple genres and nonfiction have appeared in Enkare Review, The Manchester Review, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Gutter, Interzone, AfroSF, Wasafiri, Warscapes, The Africa Report and elsewhere. In 2013 he received a Hawthornden Fellowship and a Sacatar Fellowship. He was shortlisted for the 2014 Caine Prize.