5 AFRICAN CANADIAN AUTHORS TO KNOW February 20, 2021 – Posted in: Highlights – Tags: Black History Month, Fiction, Poetry
Kagiso Lesego Molope is a South African writer who lives in Ottawa.
Her novels, set in the South Africa of the 1990s and afterwards, bear witness to the legacies of apartheid and are studied in schools across South Africa.
Her best-known book, the young adult novel This Book Betrays My Brother, won a Percy FitzPatrick Award and an Ottawa Book Award. and was named to best-of lists by Kirkus Reviews, the Globe and Mail, CBC, and the Chicago Public Library.
WHAT TO READ:
Awumey is a Togolese-Canadian writer living in Gatineau, in western Quebec.
His novels have won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and the Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire, and been shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes.
His works simmer with socio-political commentary, exploring alienation, violence and the conditions that produce it, as well as the human yearnings amidst it all.
WHAT TO READ:
Born in Zimbabwe and raised during the decades-long Rhodesian civil war, Yvonne Vera was one of the most universally acclaimed, highly awarded writers to emerge from the African continent.
Her challenging works of fiction are read for their poetics and linguistic elements as much as for their feminist and postcolonial themes in universities worldwide.
She wrote with an eye on colonialism, racism, the long consequences of white and patriarchal rule, the pain and abjection of so many women’s lives, and the physical beauty of her homeland.
WHAT TO READ:
Dannabang Kuwabong is a Ghanaian-Canadian poet and professor of Caribbean literature writing in English and Dagaare.
His poetry returns often to the relationship between history and home, showing a breadth that comes with the nomadic experience of being of multiple origins.
His poems teem with the lives of ancestors, present-day immigrants, and fellow city-dwellers and are conscious of belonging to what is the sprawling, variegated African experience across continents and across time.
WHAT TO READ:
Born and raised in, and later forcibly removed from, the District Six neighbourhood that went on to symbolize the violence of apartheid, Rozena Maart is a South African writer whose work is deeply committed to social justice.
She was nominated for South Africa’s “Woman of the Year” award in 1987 for her role in starting the nation’s first Black feminist organization.
Her fiction examines our social worlds and how they are shaped by racism, violence against women, and homophobia, doing so through shifting and connected perspectives.
WHAT TO READ:
