Author: Carl Brandon Society

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Amitav Ghosh, Nisi Shawl and others on Publishers’ Weekly’s best books of 2008

This week, Publishers’ Weekly posted the list of books it has judged the best of 2008. Among the works of the fantastic on the list by writers of colour are books by Amitav Ghosh, Jaime Hernandez, the CBS’s own Nisi Shawl, and others.

Publishers’ Weekly says: Once again, we take the opportunity near year’s end to review the year in books, highlighting the very best of what American publishing* had to offer in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, comics, religion, lifestyle and children’s. There were the authors we expected to deliver, and they did.

Congratulations to everyone on the list. Some of the titles:

Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Diaspora, myth and a fascinating language mash-up propel the Rubik’s cube of plots in Ghosh’s picaresque epic. The cast is marvelous and the plot majestically serpentine, but the real hero is the English language, which has rarely felt so alive and vibrant.

Filter House
Nisi Shawl (Aqueduct)
Shawl’s exquisitely rendered debut collection weaves threads of folklore, religion, family and the search for a cohesive self through a panorama of race, magic and the body.

The Education of Hopey Glass
Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics)
Perpetual punk Hopey Glass must face the loss of her ambitions in yet another stunning book from Hernandez.

Travel
Yuichi Yokoyama (Picturebox)
A train journey becomes a madly energetic blueprint for an alternate reality in this abstract, experimental manga.

*It’s not all American publishing. The non-SF/F graphic novel Skim, by Canadians Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, was published by Groundwood Books, based in my home city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Look for more of Jillian Tamaki’s work in Hiromi Goto‘s forthcoming fantasy novel Half World, a January 2009 release.

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Nnedimma Okorafor wins Soyinka Prize for Literature


Nnedimma Okorafor and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka


Nnedimma Okorafor

Nigerian-American author Nnedimma Okorafor is the winner of the 2008 Soyinka Prize for Literature for her novel Zahrah the Windseeker.

This is the second year that the biennial prize, first awarded by the Lumina Foundation in 2006, has been given. From 126 entries the judges chose three finalists: Beast of The Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala; The Weaving Looms, by Wale Okediran; and Zahrah The Windseeker, by Nnedimma Okorafor.

From the Foundation’s website:

The Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa was established by The Lumina Foundation in 2005. It was conceived as a very prestigious prize in honour of Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in literature to celebrate excellence in all its cerebral grace, its liberating qualities, the honour and recognition it brings to a myriad of people, of diverse cultures and languages. This prize honours people who have used their talents well enough to affect others positively. It honours Africa’s great writers and causes their works to be appreciated. It celebrates excellent writing, promotes scholarship and makes books available and affordable by subsidizing the publication of books in the top list of the judges. This is a pan African prize, viewed also as Africa’s NOBEL prize. It unifies Africans, celebrates Africa’s great minds, brings home Africa’s best intellectuals as judges, entertainers, great communicators and leaders in their own rights.