Translations for books by Helon Habila, Max Lobe, Koleka Putuma, and Sarah Ladipo Manyika are currently available for your reading pleasure.
Title: Drei Weise Aus Dem Bantuland
Author: Max Lobe
Translator: Katharina Triebner-Cabald
Publishing Date: November 6, 2020
Original title: La Trinité bantoue
Publisher: Austernbank
Translation: French to German
Blurb:
With his university diploma, Mwána holds the ticket to professional life in her hand. But with the growing pile of rejections, his self-confidence melts. What’s wrong with his white cousins? Meanwhile, the political situation is coming to a head. Some want to chase black sheep out of the country. Mwána takes note of the posters of a right-wing party calling for “Black sheep out!” That’s the same phrase he knows from his Bantu homeland. Educated and multilingual, he lives in an urban, progressive milieu and by no means sees himself as an outsider in Switzerland, his host country in the middle of Europe. In his private life, he found happiness with Ruedi, with whom he has an open relationship. He disappoints with relish negative role ascriptions, associate racists with his skin color. From his non-political point of view, however, he only questions his personal failure, not the lack of equal opportunities and everyday discrimination that confront him.
Max Lobe who born in Cameroon lives in Geneva. “Drei Weise Aus Dem Bantuland” his second novel, which was awarded the Prix du roman des Romands and was on the shortlist of the Prix des Cinq Continents. His first novel was 39 rue de Berne.
Title: Reisen
Author: Helon Habila
Translator: Susann Urban
Ed: Indra Wussow
Original title: Travellers.
Publisher: wunderhorn.de/
Translation: English to German.
Blurb: A Nigerian academic living in the USA visits his American wife Gina in Berlin. Gina is an art scholarship holder and is currently working on a project about migrants. The protagonist also gets to know many African immigrants and refugees in Berlin and thus learns about their experiences of escape. For him, who leads a privileged and secure life as a black intellectual, these encounters unexpectedly lead to deep self-reflection. He questions his previous life and realizes that he is inextricably linked to their fate and can no longer lead his life separately from the everyday misery of the migrants. The stories of these people lead him from a Berlin nightclub to a refugee camp in Sicily, to a doctor from Libya, whose wife and child drowned in the Mediterranean, and to London to a poet from Malawi living in exile. He experiences a “reverse” migration that confronts him directly with the life and suffering of migrants and all the judgments – including prejudices – of Western societies. In his novel, Habila creates a mosaic of the most diverse experiences of migrants. He shows that the issues of displacement and migration will remain “eternal” issues
Helon Habila books include Prison Stories (2000), Waiting for an Angel: A Novel (2004, New Writing 14 (2006), Measuring Time: A Novel (2007), Dreams, Miracles, and Jazz: An Anthology of New Africa Fiction (2007), (co-edited with Kadija George), Oil on Water: A Novel (2010), The Granta Book of the African Short Story (2011), The Chibok Girls (2017), and Travelers: A Novel (2019).
Title: Morayo
Author: Sarah Ladipo Manyika
Original title: Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun
Publisher: Metalucida
Translator: Sandra Buenaventura
Translation: English to Spanish
Publication Date: November 2020.
Blurb: Morayo Da Silva, a cosmopolitan Nigerian woman, lives in San Francisco. Almost seventy-five, she has a zest for life and enjoys road trips in her vintage Porsche. But when Morayo has an accident, crushing her independence, she is prompted to reassess her relationships and recollect her past life and loves. A humorous, joyful read.
Sarah Ladipo Manyika teaches literature at San Francisco State University. Her first novel, In Dependence, has sold over 1.5 million copies in Nigeria. Sarah sits on the boards of Hedgebrook and San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora and was the Chair of Judges for the Etisalat Prize for Literature in 2015.
Title: Collectief geheugenverlies
Author: Koleka Putuma
Translator: Ludo Abicht
Original title: Collective Amnesia
Publisher: Poeziecentrum vzw
Publishing date: September 21, 2020
Translation: English to Dutch
Blurb: This highly-anticipated debut collection from one of the country’s most acclaimed young voices marks a massive shift in South African poetry. Koleka Putuma’s exploration of blackness, womxnhood and history in Collective Amnesia is fearless and unwavering. Her incendiary poems demand justice, insist on visibility and offer healing. In them, Putuma explodes the idea of authority in various spaces – academia, religion, politics, relationships – to ask what has been learnt and what must be unlearnt. Through grief and memory, pain and joy, sex and self-care, Collective Amnesia is a powerful appraisal, reminder and revelation of all that has been forgotten and ignored, both in South African society, and within ourselves.
Koleka Putuma is a South African queer poet and theatre-maker. Collective Amnesia is her first collection of poetry.
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