dem ersten panafrikansichen Literaturpreises für Erstlingswerke.
Preisgeld: 15.000 Pfund
Es sind interessante Bücher dabei, gerade für Leser, die gerne auf literarische Weltreise gehen.
Hoffentlich wird das eine oder andere Buch dieser Liste noch in Deutsch übersetzt.
Nominiert sind:
Kurzbeschreibung:
Leke is a troubled young man living in the suburbs of Cape Town. He develops strange habits of stalking people, stealing small objects and going from doctor to doctor in search of companionship rather than cure. Through a series of letters written to him by his Nigerian father whom he has never met, Leke learns about a family curse; a curse which his father had unsuccessfully tried to remove. Bom Boy is a well-crafted, and complex narrative written with a sensitive understanding of both the smallness and magnitude of a single life.
Kurzbeschreibung:
The focal point of the novel is the small town of Soutbek. Its troubles, hardships and corruption, but also its kindness, strong community and friendships, are introduced to us in a series of stories about intriguingly interlinked relationships. Contemporary Soutbek is still a divided town - the upper town destitute, and the lower town rich, largely ignorant - and through a series of vivid scenes, the troubled relationship between Pieter Fortuin, the town's first coloured mayor, and his wife Anna is revealed. In so many ways the past casts a long shadow over the present, not in the least through the unreliable diaries of Pieter Meerman promoted by Pieter Fortuin and Professor Pearson, a retired white historian. They give us a unique insight into the lives of the seventeenth-century Dutch explorers, and hint at a utopian society, suggesting that Soutbek is the birthplace of assimilation and integration. The blossoming friendship between Anna, Sara, a foundling, and Willem, Pieter Fortuin's nephew, is unsettled by David, Anna's and Pieter's son. His father has bought David a bright future, but when he comes back from boarding school David appears alienated from his father and from his old friend, the former gardener Charles Geduld, just as Anna starts to accept him as her son. Is there hope, or are we left with Willem's conclusion that 'he would spend the rest of his life working off the debt of his family's poverty'? A moving story that paints a thought-provoking picture of life in contemporary South Africa.
Kurzbeschreibung:
'To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti and not even this one we live in - who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?'
Darling and her friends live in a shanty called Paradise, which of course is no such thing. It isn't all bad, though. There's mischief and adventure, games of Find bin Laden, stealing guavas, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices.
They dream of the paradises of America, Dubai, Europe, where Madonna and Barack Obama and David Beckham live. For Darling, that dream will come true. But, like the thousands of people all over the world trying to forge new lives far from home, Darling finds this new paradise brings its own set of challenges - for her and also for those she's left behind.
Gewonnen hat NoViolet Bulawayo mit ihren Debütroman We Need New Names
ZitatSie schildert darin die Reise der zehnjährigen Darling von Simbabwe nach Amerika, wo ihre Tante lebt. Im Versuch, auf diese Weise einem von Perspektivlosigkeit und Gewalt geprägten Alltag zu entrinnen, sieht sie sich mit den Restriktionen konfrontiert, mit denen das Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten Migrierenden begegnet.