Nwokolo On Tour With 'The Ghost Of Sani Abacha'

Chuma Nwokolo, author of a new collection of short stories entitled 'The Ghost Of Sani Abacha' is currently on tour in the UK as his initial Nigerian tour had to be suspended due to the recent strike action. This collection of 26 humorous short stories is set in a post-autocratic country whose indigenes suffer varying levels of Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSDs) caused by three decades of military occupation.

Called to the bar in 1984, Nwokolo worked briefly for the Legal Aid Council and was managing partner of the C&G Chambers, Lagos. He was also writer-in-residence of The Ashmolean, Oxford, and chair of Leys Newspapers. He is a public speaker and publisher of African Writing Magazine.

His books include 'Diaries of a Dead African', 'One More Tale for the Road' and the poetry collection, 'Memories of Stone'. The first 'Diary of a Dead African', originally published by London Review of Books, was selected by La Internazionale as one of the three best stories worldwide in 2001. African Writing Limited publishes an eponymous four-year-old literary magazine. The company is also promoting a national book club dedicated to young adults with an adventure series, The Thriller Club.
Jan 25, 2012 - Liverpool
Jan 26, 2012 -Manchester
Jan 28, 2012 - Swansea

Nwokolo will also embark on a reading tour of South Africa, Ghana and Kenya.

Literary Star Search contest

Seems like January is the month for literary contest writers and with mouth-watering and palm-sweating prizes up for grabs, entering a competition or two is definitely a great new year resolution for 2012! 

WRITE Yourself to FAME & FORTUNE!!! in the Liteary Star Search contest for Nigeria’s star writers in the SHORT STORY category (not more than 3,500 words long).

One Million Naira Grand Prize, N300,000 and N200,000 respectively for the second and third best places.

The best 25 stories will be published in a collection and entered for competition worldwide, including the Caine & Commonwealth Short Story Prizes

To apply, write not more than a 3,500 word short story (double space typing) and enclose with Three Thousand naira (N3,000) Entry Fee in bank draft obtainable from any Zenith International Bank Plc branch nationwide, and payable (addressed) to Creative Alliance. Deliver by hand or courier service, addressed to:

Creative Alliance Nigeria Limited (Literary Star Search)
1, Oladosu Street, Off Toyin Street, Ikeja, Lagos

OR

Creative Alliance (Literary Star Search)
PO Box 2442 Ikeja, Lagos.

For further enquiries, please call: 08057712377; 08091031390

Email: ozoro4u@yahoo.ca; literarystarsearch@gmail.com; dreampartners@yahoo.com
Website: http://www.creativeallianceng.com/; http://www.creativealliance.blogspot.com/

Call for Submissions: Book Republic Blog

Book Republic is scouting for the next writing talent in Nigeria. We are presently accepting Short Essays, Poems and Short Stories from interested writers for publication on our blog http://www.progresspublishing.wordpress.com/.

Our blog is dedicated towards promoting the writing and reading culture in Nigeria and Africa in general. We strongly believe that refined African voices should be heardand celebrated in the written format.

Entry Fee: Free
CATEGORIES

POETRY- 20 - 40lines

Short Story - 850 - 3000 words

Short Essays - 1000 - 3000 words


Endeavour to attach a short bio and probably, a picture alongside your submission. All submissions should be forwarded to Bookrepublic2012@gmail.com.

Some of the published entries will be forwarded to international writing competitions on behalf of our authors. This would be after we might have sought the consent of the chosen writers.

Lantern Books: Children’s Publishing Success in Nigeria

An excerpt of Dennis Abrams' piece from Publishing Perspectives...this should cheer our budding children book writers...


It has been a long journey for Olayinka Lawal-Solarin. From working in his own business as a retail pharmacist, he became proprietor and managing director of Corona Chemists Nigeria in 1969. That same year, he pioneered medical publishing in Nigeria with Medipharm, a medical index or pharmaceutical specialties, the first of its kind in Africa. This led to the incorporation of Literamed Publications Nigeria Limited in 1969, which has since gone beyond Medipharm and other medical journals into children’s books.


Why children’s books? As Olayinkia said in an interview, “As a child growing up in Nigeria and as an adult growing up in the United Kingdom, I realized that there is a great difference in child’s education between the UK and Nigeria. There was a deficiency in children’s education both at the basic level and in the provision of toys. [So] when the opportunity presented itself to do something about it I did. Building my own printing press to tackle the technicality of medical publications, I decided to expand Literamed to the publication of children’s books which I was considered was needed to give children in my country a sound basic education.”

Today, Literamed Publications Limited is Nigeria’s leading children’s book publisher, and its imprint, Lantern Books, has become a household name in Nigeria and throughout West Africa. By publishing textbooks by established authors in line with approved curriculums to story books which serve as a springboard for young readers, Lantern Books caters to West African youth from pre-school through secondary education.

Olayinka, or “Yinka” as he is known to his friends, is particularly pleased that Lantern Story Books had expanded into seven series: Adventure, Folk Tales, Fairy Tales, Health, Heroes, Bible Stories, and Literary. Each series is further divided into age groups of 4-7 years, 8-12 years, 13-16 years, and 17 years and above. Most of these titles serve double-duty, both as leisure reading and as literature texts used in Nigerian schools.

Apart from textbooks, Literamed publishes over 100 books a year, and as one of the very few publishers in Nigeria with its own press, it has a sizable advantage by giving Olayinka complete control over every aspect of the production process, from manuscript to book, ensuring both high-quality and availability all year round — something that many other West African publishers cannot promise.

Read the rest here.

The Writer Competition

The Writer is an online ‘reality’ writing competition.

The Process.

Ten writers will be shortlisted from the entry submissions. These writers will contest in an online writing competition. The competition will require all writers to send in themed write-ups/posts weekly. Posts from all writers will be put up for members of the public to read and vote for.

At the end of the voting period, a panel of judges will evaluate the posts and score them using pre-communicated criteria. The public votes and the votes from the judges will be combined and based on this; one writer will be eliminated weekly until a winner emerges.

Who is it for?

There are no age or gender restrictions for the competition. All members of the public are encouraged to send in pre-qualification entries.

How to qualify?

To stand a chance to qualify for the competition, email a 1000 word piece on the topic: “This Christmas” to thewriter@thenakedconvos.com on or before January 6th 2012. Style and direction is totally up to you. Submissions could be in form of stories, articles etc. Only shortlisted writers will be contacted.

Prizes
First – $1000
Second – $750
Third – $500

Happy 2012

Here's a poem to bid farewell to 2011 and usher 2012 in. More power to your elbow and sweat to your palms (to get the writing jouciesd flowing all year long). 

The Old Year
by John Clare

The Old Year's gone away


To nothingness and night:

We cannot find him all the day

Nor hear him in the night:

He left no footstep, mark or place

In either shade or sun:

The last year he'd a neighbour's face,

In this he's known by none.



All nothing everywhere:

Mists we on mornings see

Have more of substance when they're here

And more of form than he.

He was a friend by every fire,

In every cot and hall--

A guest to every heart's desire,

And now he's nought at all.



Old papers thrown away,

Old garments cast aside,

The talk of yesterday,

Are things identified;

But time once torn away

No voices can recall:

The eve of New Year's Day

Left the Old Year lost to all.

iRead

When it Gets Sour by Tracy Nwanwubar

He ran his left hand through his silky brown hair like he would do when his colleagues at the office were responding too slowly on a task. She held a frozen smile. She stuffed her items into her grey hand bag, yet she knew she wanted to be in that house for five years more. With quick steps, she grabbed her panties from the silver hanger in the toilet. She remembered that night when they had dinner at the Chinese food court in Mega Plaza, how he held her hands every minute, how he asked her softly what they were going to order, how he told her to raise her head from his thighs when she was going to take a nap, because she was too tired from work and he didn’t want people to think she was giving him a blow job in public like Oyibos would make Naija girls do. She was going to miss him taking her out, as usual, for a treat; instead of making her cook dinner for them both.

Abdourahman Waberi’s “Passage of Tears” Reviewed by Anderson Tepper

The young French-Djiboutian author Abdourahman A. Waberi is one of the more inventive of a new wave of African writers, and is also unique in the range of his influences. His work manages to reference authors as diverse as Nuruddin Farah, Rimbaud, and Walter Benjamin, which also gives you a sense of how he has continued to confound expectations of both literary genres and African writing.

The Cock Thief by Parselelo Kantai

This girl whose name eluded him. She was skinny and small and probably more than a little high on the miraa bulging in her cheek. She looked very different from her voice, a rough, rousing roar of four in the morning in those dark little hovels by the roadside, the ones run by fat round women called Rhoda and Francisca who serve cheap lethal brews to broken men in oversized jackets. Now she spat suddenly into a polythene bag magically extracted from somewhere in the complicated folds of her clothes. And then she was unwrapping half of a Big G, chewing it, making rude, rhythmic clicks. She seemed to appreciate the sound more than the flavour. She stared at him the whole time, her large liquid eyes shining out of the khanga that covered her head and framed her face; the rest of it disappeared inside a fur-lined jacket, unzipped half-way down to reveal a T-shirt tucked tight into a pair of worn jeans. Limuru, he knew, got very cold. He wondered what she would do with her jacket in the heat of Kampala. But it was the boots with their steel-tipped points that convinced him this was a malaya, going west to seek new flesh markets. There was no money in Kenya. Everybody was leaving, and lying about it.

Chris Abani: Distorting Africa's History

The world is now privy to the myriad lies and exaggerations of the acclaimed writer, Professor Christopher Abani regarding his imaginary ordeal in Nigeria’s prisons (mostly Kirikiri). The lies are compelling and give Africa a black eye: The death sentence imposed on him because of his involvement in military coups as a teenager and his alleged witness to the execution of at least one 14-year old through death by nailing of his penis to a chair until he bled to death. The shocking revelations of Abani’s “419” activities are detailed here on my blog.

The Chrysalis by Hannah Parry

His mother ruffled his hair, which he hated for its darkness, hair that made him feel marked out, different.  Hair as dark as if Mussolini himself had snuck over the Bavarian border into his mother’s bed, the night Otto was conceived.

He wasn’t the only brunette, of course, but as a general rule where most of the children were large, he was small; where they were clean, he was grubby, and where they were amused, he was bored.  Childhood, to Otto, seemed like very hard work and he found himself wishing away the days from a comparatively young age.
The summer of 1926 was hot and to the twelve-year-old Otto’s delight, mosquitoes laid their eggs in places where it was normally too cold.

Have a great 2012 Bookaholics!