Blog Debut: Welcome January 17, 2019 – Posted in: Roundup – Tags:

New year, new us.

Welcome to our new website! With this big update comes a sleek new look, easy access to all our available titles.

For some 40 years Mawenzi House and its progenitor TSAR Publications have devoted themselves to publishing fresh new writing from Canada and across the world that reflects more truly the diversity and intermixing of our rapidly globalizing world. Acutely aware that the “mainstream” culture dominating Canada and elsewhere has been Western in its essence, we have focused our endeavors to promoting especially works by writers of non-Western origins–Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Caribbean and, more recently, Aboriginal Canadian.

Some past achievements. Earlier on in our history, we contributed to the formulation of the Indo-Caribbean historical identity of the “jahaji bhai” through the publication of several groundbreaking titles and two anthologies; we also published provocative and perceptive social and literary criticism by Arnold Itwaru, Arun Prabha Mukherjee, Chelva Kanaganayakam, and Nigel Thomas; and  critical studies of over 20 writers of diverse backgrounds in our ongoing Confluences series; the now major Zimbabwean (and Canadian) writer Yvonne Vera was introduced to the world by us; we published the first historical and critical study of Chinese Canadian writing, and the first anthologies of South Asian Canadian literature, South Asian Canadian women’s poetry, and South Asian Canadian and American women’s short fiction in the series Her Mother’s Ashes.

2018 was eventful. We were thrilled that Togolese Quebecois Edem Awumey’s novel Descent into Night (2017), translated from the French Explication de la nuit, by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation. We also saw Kagiso Molope’s This Book Betrays My Brother on many Best Books lists, including The Globe and Mail, the CBC, the Chicago Public Library, and multiple lists on Kirkus Reviews. New editions of Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda and Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals, came out, introduced by MG Vassanji. Perparim Kapllani’s Kosovo novel, The Thin Line, received front-page coverage in the Toronto Star and is on display at several Toronto libraries.

This year, 2019, is full of new and exciting books that we are eager to share with you. Watch out for: Sohan Koonar’s thrilling epic novel Paper Lions, describing the history of a Sikh community in Punjab from pre-WWII to modern times; Hasan Santur’s Youth of God, about a brilliant Somali teenager growing up in Toronto’s west end, caught between intellectual ambition and fundamentalist faith; and My Totem Came Calling (Young Adult), in which a Zimbabwean girl journeys into the interior to search for her identity and regain her memory. And much more.

Watch this space for our poetry selections.
Expect a chatty, informal history of Mawenzi-TSAR in the coming months.
And stay tuned as we post fun giveaways, excerpts, author Q&A’s, and much more!

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