The Scattering by Botswana author Lauri Kubuitsile has won the prize for best international fiction at this year’s Sharjah International Book Fair 2017, the world’s third largest book fair, in the United Arab Emirates.
The news was announced and the prize was accepted by the author’s daughter at an opening ceremony in Sharjah on 1 November.
First published in 2016 by Penguin Random House in South Africa, Kubuitsile’s The Scattering is a moving and intimate novel that brings to life the genocide of the Herero and Nama people in German South-West Africa in the early 1900s. Against the backdrop of southern Africa’s colonial wars at the dawn of the twentieth century, the novel traces the fates of two remarkable women whose paths cross after each has suffered the devastation and dislocation of war.
The Scattering has been described by Tendai Huchu as ‘an ambitious, powerful and poignant historical novel that brings to life a very important period’ and has subsequently been published in the Unites States by Waveland Press
The Scattering is available online and at bookstores countrywide:
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