Ghana Poetry Prize

ANNOUNCEMENT
Poetry Foundation Ghana announces its inaugural (2013) GHANA POETRY PRIZE. This will be an award of Gh ₵ 2,000 (equivalent to $ 1,000). This is built on the hugely successful 2012 Online Competition which was done under the name Ghana Poetry Awards.
The aim of this prize is to support younger emerging poets. The Prize is sponsored by Poetry Foundation Ghana and we hope to increase our Prize when we have enough funds from other sources. People with interest in poetry are invited to help in this direction and we will be grateful for your sponsorship.

ENJOY

And good luck.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

That makes Americanah a new kind of migration story, one that reflects a political shift and suggests a literary one. It’s one of the better novels I’ve read about life in contemporary America, but I’m not tempted to call it a Great American Novel. Instead, it strikes me as an early, imperfect, admirable stab at something new: a Great Global Novel. Ifemelu was well on her way to becoming an American—that promise dangled before, and coveted by, so much of the world for so long. She chooses, instead, to become an Americanah: an identity predicated on experience rather than nationality, trajectory rather than place. It’s an open question whether identities like that will change the world for the better. But, in Adichie, they have already done so for literature.

ENJOY

Of Rising, and the Home-based Nigerian Writer - Ukamaka Olisakwe

Writing. I had never loved literature. I grew up in a place where Arts students were called ‘unserious’ while the Science students were praised for their serious-mindedness. And being a teenager who always felt she had something to prove, I joined the Science class. Later I would go on to study Computer Science. But I lost all that seriousness and consciousness that Science required. Perhaps I began to see Science as one large menacing figure, ambling around me, striping me of my emotions. Life is created from one’s thought. Our thoughts give rise to actions that make or break a people. Once, I had imagined life was me dreaming and the world and everyone in it existed only in my subconscious. Again, it seemed my stories were made manifest in an alternate universe, creating and disrupting lives, changing destinies. It was a defining point in my life and there was joy in finding my place and deriving joy in a craft that came to me like breathing. I had finally realized who I was meant to be and who I will always be: a storyteller."
ENJOY

Why Soyinka’s Sahara Reporters Interview is Disappointing - Ainehi Edoro

On Saturday, Soyinka gave a rather revealing account of his relationship with Achebe and his sense of Achebe’s work within the context of the African literary tradition. It was in the form an interview done by Sahara Reporters, who as we all know are very skilled at making interviewees respond to controversial questions. I find the interview to be a strange document.
First of all, I find it odd that the first substantial set of reflections that Soyinka shares about Achebe after his death should take the form of an interview that, for all its aspiration to honesty, comes across as bitter and smug"
ENJOY

SaharaReporters Interview Exclusive: Achebe A Celebrated Storyteller, But No Father Of African Literature, Says Soyinka

"In a wide-ranging interview with SaharaReporters, Soyinka paid tribute to the late novelist who died on March 21, 2013 at 82. Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature, also spoke on his personal relationship with Achebe and other Nigerian writers; his regrets about Achebe’s last book, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra; and his attempt to talk the late Biafran leader, Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, out of fighting a war. Soyinka also answered questions about Heinemann’s African Writers Series and scolded “clannish” and “opportunistic hagiographers” fixated on the fact that Achebe never won the Nobel Prize."

ENJOY

To Be Vulnerable and Fearless: An Interview with Writer Warsan Shire

"I still feel very homeless. I live in London and have been here nearly my whole life, but it is a difficult city to connect to. I have travelled around and found my body making more sense elsewhere. But I have started to understand what it feels like to belong, so I look forward to exploring different countries and seeing how fully I can feel at home in a place, that at the end of the day, isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before. "



Insightful interview. Great words.

ENJOY