QuickThots on #NobelPrizeLiterature

Abdulrazak Gurnah is the SIXTH African writer to have won the Nobel Prize in literature. Others include Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, JM Coetzee and Doris Lessing. 1/ There's tidy alignment b/w ascendancy of multiculturalism movements in Europe and recipients of the LitNobel. Soyinka, Mahfouz, Gordimer, Walcott, Morrison & Ōe won successively from 1986-1994. For a brief 8 years, LitNobel was diverse, political, progressive, with-it. 2/

Hardly a review of The NYT Review since Parul Sehgal doesn't shed light around the commissioning process. While reviews are often solicited from non-experts, African literature is almost always reviewed by white non-experts.
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nytimes.com/2021/02/26/boo… Somali writer Nuruddin Farah's novel North of Dawn was reviewed by Melanie Finn, self-described as 'I’m a writer, a mother, the founder and director of a small healthcare charity in the remote Tanzanian bush" melaniefinn.com/contact

There’s always critique about lazy acacia-sunset book cover for African books. I don’t get when/how the fertile acacia period occurred but older covers of #Africanlit are just extra extra extra fabulous 🌸💖Offloading #thread here for future reference