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The 2011 Award

 

 

Unigwe

On Black Sisters' Street

by Chika Unigwe

 

 

 

 

 

Nominated by:

  • Hoofdstedelijke Openbare Bibliotheek, Brussels, Belgium.

 

Publisher of Nominated Edition:

Jonathan Cape, UK.

 

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

 
Before Efe came to Belgium, she imagined castles and clean streets and snow as white as salt. Belgium, ‘…a country wey dey Europe. Next door to London'. 
 
At the house on Zwarterzusterstraat four very different women have made their way from Africa to claim for themselves the riches of Europe. Sisi, Ama, Efe and Joyce are prostitutes, the girls who stand in the windows of the red-light district, promising to make men’s dreams come true – if only for half an hour and fifty euros. The murder of Sisi, the most enigmatic of the women, shatters their already fragile world and as the women gather to mourn, the stories they have kept hidden are finally told. 
 
Drawn together by tragedy, the women reveal, each in her own voice, what has brought them to their present lives. Joyce, a great beauty whose life has been destroyed by war; Ama, whose dark moods manifest a past injustice; Efe, whose efforts to earn her keep are motivated by a particular zeal and finally, Sisi, whose imagination takes her far beyond the squalor of her reality. These are stories of terror, of displacement, of love, and of a sinister man named Dele… 
 
Raw, vivid and suffused with the power of the oral story-telling tradition, On Black Sisters’ Street is a moving story of the illusion of the West through African eyes, and its annihilation. It is also, however, a story of courage, of unity and of hope. 

 (From Publisher).

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria and now lives in Turnhout, Belgium, with her husband and four children. She holds a PhD from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands and is the recipient of several awards for her short stories, including first prize in the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition, a Commonwealth Short Story Award and a Flemish literary prize for “De Smaak Van Sneeuw”, her first short story written in Dutch. In 2004 she was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her stories have been on the BBC World Service and Radio Nigeria.

Her first novel, De Feniks, was published in Dutch by Meulenhoff in September 2005; it is the first book of fiction written by a Flemish author of African origin.

 

LIBRARIANS' COMMENTS

Choice no. 2 of our readers.

 

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