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The 2008 Award

Wizard of the Crow

Wizard of the Crow

Wizard of the Crow

by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Translated from Gikuyu by Ngugi wa Thiong'o


 

 

Nominated by:

  • Cork City Libraries, Ireland
  • M.I. Rudomino State Library for Foreign Literature, Moscow, Russia
  • The Free State Provincial Library Service, Bloemfontein, South Africa
  • The Gambia National Library, Banjul, The Gambia
  • Kenya National Library Service, Nairobi, Kenya

 

Publisher of Nominated Edition:


Harvill Press

ISBN: 9781846550348

Pantheon Books

ISBN: 9780375422485

 

 

the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors
ABOUT THE BOOK

In exile for more than twenty years, Ngugi wa Thiong'o has become one of the most widely read African writers of our time, the power and scope of his work garnering him international attention and praise. His aim in Wizard of the Crow is, in his own words, nothing less than 'to sum up Africa of the twentieth century in the context of 2,000 years of world history.'

Commencing in 'our times' and set in the 'Free Republic of Aburiria', the novel dramatises with corrosive humour and keenness of observation a battle for control of the souls of the Aburirian people. Fashioning the stories of the powerful and the ordinary into a dazzling mosaic, Ngugi reveals humanity in all its ceaselessly surprising complexity.

Informed by richly enigmatic traditional African storytelling, Wizard of the Crow is a masterpiece, the crowning achievement in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's career thus far.

(From Publisher)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ngugi wa Thiong'o is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature ate the university of California, Irvin, and is director of the university's International Centre for Writing and Translation. His books include Petals of Blood, for which he was imprisoned by the Kenyan government in 1977. He lives in Irvine, California.

LIBRARIANS' COMMENTS

Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s new novel is the culmination of a life-time’s work in the Kikuyu language. It has all the elements of Ngugi’s powerful, analytical, politically- conscious fiction, but with an additional epic storytelling quality. This is Africa, exploited but seething with creative life.

This big novel presents an impressive and almost all-embracing parabola of human, political, cultural and etc. condition in present-day Africa in an absolutely original and subtle manner. The African analogue of the Latin American “magic realism”, deeply enrooted in African soil (literary and metaphorically) and combining
African mentality and mythology with richness and at the same time dryness of contemporary style. The novel is doomed to become modern classic

It is a vivid, compelling and highly amusing satire about the reign of an African despot.

A great book (by one of Africa’s greatest writers) that vividly captures contemporary life in the era of globalisation.

 

 

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