Blonde Roots is now available as an unabridged audio book.
Published by Whole Story Audio Books on 1/12/09.
http://tinyurl.com/blonderootsaudio
Blonde Roots/ Audio Book
December 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment
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My Grandmother: Zenobia Evaristo
November 20, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Zenobia Evaristo, second wife of Gregorio (below). Born Zenobia Sowemima in Ibadan, Nigeria. Died 1967, Lagos, Nigeria.
Brought back to life as ‘herself’ in the new LARA. (Love the hair-do!)
Bloodaxe Books, October 29, 2009
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852248319
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Tagged: ancestry, British History, family history, fiction, historical novels, lagos, mixed-race british writers, Nigeria, nigerian history, nigerian women's history, verse novels
My Grandfather: Gregorio Evaristo
November 8, 2009 · 5 Comments

Born Brazil. Lived Nigeria. Died Cameroon 1927.
Brought to imaginary life in ’Lara’ revised & expanded (Bloodaxe Books, Oct 2009)
Literary Editor Boyd Tonkin, writing in the ‘Independent’ on 30th October 09, responds to the appearance of fascist Nick Griffin on Question Time (BBC 2) that week with a look at how writers such as myself challenge his ridiculous notions or racial purity and anti-miscegenation: ‘At a time when raucous public voices want to shout us back into boxes, it takes writers to remind us of the pleasures and the virtues of impurity’. For the full article click here:
http://tinyurl.com/tonkinlara
To buy ‘Lara’:http://tinyurl.com/laraamazon
My interview in the Voice newspaper 3/10/09
http://www.voice-online.co.uk/content.php?show=16553
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Tagged: Bernardine Evaristo, black british fiction, black british writers, Black History, Black poetry, black writing, brazilian history, brazilian slavery, britains colonial subjects, british empire, british literature, faction, family history, german history, german migration to england 19th century, Ireland, irish history, irish migration to england 19th cengtury, Lara, Literature, memoir, miscegenation, mixed-race british writers, mixed-race writers, nigerian history, Nigerian literature, personal history, post-war british migration, the fifties, the forties, the Seventies, the sixties, turkey, verse novels, world war one, world war two, WRITERS
Diana Evans: The Wonder
November 2, 2009 · 2 Comments

Diana Evans’ first novel ‘26a’ was a huge success and won, among others, the Orange Prize First Novel Award in 2005. ’The Wonder’ is her follow-up. A beautifully written novel set in Notting Hill of both the 1960s and today.

I asked Diana to write something about her thinking behind the novel. Here it is.
‘The Wonder’ was inspired by Les Ballet Negres, a dance troupe who took Europe by storm in the 1940s and whose founder was later mysteriously found dead in his home. It was further inspired by the biographies of Alvin Ailey, Lucia Joyce (James Joyce’s daughter) and, most profoundly, the eccentric Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who is now on the wall in my kitchen (Vaslav, for a while, became an obsession). I wanted to capture the glamour, the passion, the anguish, the strangeness, and most of all the movement of the dance world, while also telling the real story of Notting Hill (not the one Richard Curtis told us). Lucas Matheus lives on a canal boat, feeling increasing alienated in an increasingly gentrified Ladbroke Grove, and decides to research the once famous, now forgotten dancing lives of Antoney and Carla, the parents he never knew. In the process he discovers some dark and unsettling secrets.
And the critics say:
‘Fizzing, sexy…incredibly entertaining…the most dazzling depiction of the world of dance since Ballet Shoes’
The Times
‘This follow-up to Evans’s acclaimed debut, 26a, is also a serious work of art, with sentences like ribbons of silk winding around a skeleton of haunting imagery…Evans was born to write this novel’
Maggie Gee, Independent
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Tagged: 26a, diana evans, Notting Hill, Orange Prize, Random House
Interview with Helen Oyeyemi
October 24, 2009 · 8 Comments

Helen Oyeyemi is a bit of of a wunderkind. Well, no, she IS the Ultimate Wunderkind and I doff my cap to her. Born in 1984 she has already published three novels, the first written while she was doing her A’Levels at 18, as well as two plays. Her novels are ‘The Icarus Girl’, ‘The Opposite House’ and ‘White is for Witching’. Her plays are ‘Juniper’s Whitening’ and ‘Victimese’. Born in Nigeria, she moved to London aged four and grew up on housing estate in Lewisham, south east London. Helen studied Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge and has been a full-time writer ever since.
At a time when many aspiring writers are struggling to find their own voice (or voices) and still only dreaming of publication, Helen’s writing is thoroughly original and enigmatic – no mean feat when you’re still only in your mid-twenties.

‘White is for Witching’, published Summer 2009, is described thus:
As a child, Miranda Silver developed pica, a rare eating disorder that causes its victims to eat nonedible substances. The death of her mother when Miranda is sixteen exacerbates her condition. Nothing, however, satisfies a strange hunger passed down through women in her family. And then there’s the family house in Dover, England, converted into a bed-and-breakfast by Miranda’s father. Dover has long been known for its hostility to outsiders. But the Silver house manifests a more conscious malice towards strangers, dispatching those visitors it despises. Enraged by the constant stream of foreign staff and guests, the house finally unleashes its most destructive power.
‘Unconventional, intoxicating and deeply disquieting.’ Publishers Weekly, USA
Helen kindly agreed to a somewhat lighthearted email interview.
So, Helen, what magic potions do you use to summon the muse? I mean, most aspiring writers your age are just thinking about publishing books, not producing them out of a hat while doing a fancy twirl in top hat and tails. Explain yourself!
I think I have a problem! Story-bulimia. It’s a terrible thing. Basically you read lots and lots and then you regurgitate everything in different configurations. They’re saying there’s no cure for it, so expect more books….
What books do you wish you’d written, if any?
Sabina Murray’s The Carnivore’s Enquiry, Rebecca, Peter Pan, Wide Sargasso Sea, Affinity, Bonjour Tristesse, The Known World, Home, For Coloured Girls who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf, Susanna Moore’s In The Cut… o and…Little Women…I would have got the Laurie and Jo romance right! there’s more. Am in a constant state of deep envy.
What are your non-literary influences? Gothic films? Murder mysteries? I knew it! I knew it!
Ah you’re psychic…yes, those (though some of my favourite murder mysteries are brilliant literature – am thinking of ruth rendell’s a judgement in stone, frances ile’s before the fact and john dickson carr’s hollow man) but i get inspired by psychiatry manuals and The Fortean Times, and primary historical sources, too. I love first person accounts of women’s lives, the glimpses you catch while reading them describe other events – sixteenth century exorcisms and demonic possessions, for example.
What would your life be like if you weren’t a writer?
Bare! So bare!
You’ve been traveling a lot lately. Been anywhere nice?
Paris and New York are the ones for me. Leipzig was lovely too.
If you could be Benevolent Dictator of the United Kingdom for a year – what laws would you implement?
I would ban chewing gum! Urghhhhh chewing gum…can’t bear people going chack chack chack with it.
Yeh, me too, and people who eat with their mouths open and I’d ban other things too, like, er, the recession….So, moving swifty on – are you afraid of anything you’re not afraid to admit to being afraid of? Mice, rats, spiders, snakes, losing the telephone number of your muse etc etc?
I have to sleep with a light on. Just in case…just in case what? I don’t know. But it is non-negotiable.
Now, are you a black writer or a female writer? Aw! Only kidding. When I get asked that I want to hit someone – in a very non-violent way because I do not approve of violence of any kind – for the record.
But what do you tend to answer? Hahaha, no rilly, you first. Which would you choose if you absolutely had to? I know which I’d choose. Though if either of us says it sets back the mission of writers just being writers back by another fifty squillion years or so, doesn’t it….
I can’t choose and I rilly don’t expect you to, either. And so, moving swiftly on again -Nigeria – what do you think?
O…I don’t know much about the place.
Where do you see yourself in twenty years time?
In a locked library somewhere in Moldova, dancing cheek to cheek with my first love, Edmond Dantes, Count of Monte Cristo (yes, I will be quite, quite cracked by then)
Thank you, Miss Helen.
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Tagged: black british fiction, british authors, british literature, helen oyeyemi, the icarus girl, the opposite house
African Writers @ British Library: RECOMMENDED.
October 1, 2009 · Leave a Comment
‘Over the past ten years, the Caine Prize has done a great deal to foster writing in Africa and bring exciting new African writers to the attention of wider audiences.’
JM Coetzee.

This tour of exciting new writers from Africa will launch next Saturday.
Chaired by novelist Aminatta Forna with an introduction by Ben Okri, the four writers appearing will be Chika Unigwe (see my earlier post on her impressive novel ON BLACK SISTER’S STREET – down side panel), Brian Chikwava, Binyvanga Wainaina and EC Osundo.
Sat 10th October 2.30-4m
British Library
Euston Road
London NW1 2DB
Tickets: £6/£4
Box Office:01937 546 546
http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events95570.html
For more information on this event AND the nationwide tour visit the Caine Prize website at http://www.caineprize.com/10th_anni.php

Chika Unigwe was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2004 for her short story “The Secret” and was awarded a PhD from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, in the same year. She won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition for her story “Borrowed Smile”, a Commonwealth Short Story Award for “Weathered Smiles” and a Flemish literary prize for “De Smaak van Sneeuw”. Chika Unigwe’s stories have been broadcast on BBC World Service, Radio Nigeria, and other Commonwealth Radio Stations. Her second novel, Fata Morgana, was published in Dutch in 2008 and is published in English as On Black Sisters Street by Jonathan Cape.

Brian Chikwava won the Caine Prize in 2004 for his short story “Seventh Street Alchemy” and published his first novel Harare North (Jonathan Cape) in April 2009 to critical acclaim. He was a Charles Pick fellow at the University of East Anglia, and his work has appeared in short story collections published by Weaver Press, Jacana, Picador Africa, Umuzi and in the journals World Literature Today, Wasafiri, Moving Worlds, Literary Review, The Literary Encyclopaedia and others. Some of his stories have also been broadcast on BBC Radios 3 and 4 and Worldservice and is currently working on a short story collection.

Binyavanga Wainaina won the Caine Prize in 2002 for this short story ‘Discovering Home’ and famously used his prize money to set up the literary journal Kwani, now in its fifth issue. He writes a weekly column for the ‘Mail’ and ‘Guardian’ in South Africa and his writing has also appeared in the ‘New York Times’, ‘Granta’ and ‘National Geographic’. He is the newly-appointed Director of the Chinua Achebe Centre for African Literature and Lanugages at Bard College, New York.

EC (Epaphras Chukwuenweniwe) Osondu was born in Nigeria and worked as an advertising copywriter for many years before moving to New York to study for his MFA in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. He has won the Allen and Nirelle Galso Prize for Fiction and his story “a Letter from Home” was judged one of ‘The Top Ten Stories on the internet’ in 2006. In 2007 his story “Jimmy Carter’s Eyes” was short-listed for the Caine Prize and in 2009 his story “Waiting” won the coveted prize. He now teaches at Providence University on Rhode Island. A short story collection will be published by Harper Collins in 2010.
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After nine years’ search I’ve finally found this photo – the trigger for my opening poem ‘The Strait-Jackets’ in The Zoo Father. I originally came across it in an out of print book on South American wildlife during one of my obsessive trawls through Canning House’s Latin American library where I did much of my research. I photocopied it and kept it as a talisman then lost the copy, but now, thanks to the internet, I have it back. Here are over forty live hummingbirds dressed in pyjamas and packed in a suitcase. This is how the Brazilian ornithologist Augusto Ruschi used to transport his birds in a torpor by lowering their temperature and straitjacketing them to go in the plane’s hold. I immediately saw how I could take the suitcase to my father who I hadn’t seen for thirty-five years and who had recently contacted me, dying of emphysema. I wrote the poem in one go:









