Resources for finding African Authors

[Andrea]

Wow, this is a great site. Thank you!

[Muphyn]

Thanks for posting the link!! that map is fantastic! Should help heaps with future book selections (and as a general book source!).

[Nina]

Interesting. I had not seen this before. Looking at the Ghana list of authors, I can certainly think of some additions, including at least one member of this GoodReads group. But there is space to interact and update their lists, so I suspect some of us have some work to do

[Marieke]

yeah, this is pretty awesome! i had not seen it before. thanks, shoshana!

[Marieke]

I wonder ... Did Comoros ever have a different name or names?

[Marieke]

Hm. I know nothing about comoros...are there individual islands you could use to find something?

[Marieke]

So you need to find something by a person from Comoros, not just something written by a person who visited there...like a piece of travel lit or journalism?

[LeAnne]

This literary map of Africa will be really useful. Thanks.

[Muphyn]

Wow, that's an impressive list and should provide us/me with lots of reading suggestions. Nice work. :)

[Melanie]

That's a fabulous list - will absolutely be adding some of those to my reading pile.

[Eve]

Thanks for the list!!! Couple corrections though:
1) Suriname is not in Africa, its located south of Guyana on the Atlantic Coast of South America

2) The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency Series are set in Botswana not Zimbabwe.

3) The book you listed under Ethiopia has really nothing to do with Ethiopia and much more to do w/ the immigrant experience in America. Another suggestion that might fit better is the new novel by Maaza Mengiste.

Thanks again!!! I added a bunch of the books to my list

[Muphyn]

Thanks for these, Shoshana! The more resources and suggestions for books the better!

[Marieke]

Shoshana, how do you like Mema? Also--I'll have to see if my dad and his wife know about the memoir of deafness. When they were in Kenya, where my dad's wife worked for the Peace Corps and my dad volunteered his time counseling young volunteers not to go to law school (he's a retired government lawyer), there were quite a few deaf American volunteers who signed in both American and international sign language. I met a couple of them at my dad's house and my dad's wife told me what marvelous volunteers they were with the deaf Kenyan community, but i never got a chance to sit and talk with them except to say hi and nice to meet you.

[Mahriana]

Here is another resource to add to this thread on information.

This is a pretty new website I found out about where someone is indexing links to pages on African authors (in some cases just wikipedia or other databases like that, in some cases the author's own home page or website) and other sites of relevance to African literature. Either way, it is a good place to see a list of significant African writers. And our own Manu Herbstein has recently been added! :)

Index of African Writing and Writers

[Nina]

Thanks Margaine for publicizing the "Index of African writing and writers" website; at least it is better than nothing, though the order of authors is not exactly straightforward...

[Mahriana]

Yes, it seems that the order is just the order that they added the authors to the website. Since it's through a blog, they seem not to be able to change the order otherwise. It would certainly be easier if it were alphabetical.