In four weeks time, I’ll be taking part in a publishing tour to South Africa as a finalist with the British Council’s UK Young Publishing Entrepreneur award. Before I go, I want to answer a few questions: how do we value South African literature in this country? How and where do British readers interact with South African writing? To what extent does the industry nurture South African authors? Does our marketing do justice to their work? This blog will record my conversations and research before I leave the UK, and report on the book trade while I’m in South Africa.
Of all contemporary African literature, it is probably Nigeria’s which has loomed largest in the UK and US literary pages over recent few years, thanks largely to novelists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Helen Oyeymi, who have introduced a younger generation of readers to an established literary tradition which includes luminaries Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka. Two South Bank Shows were devoted to Nigerian literature in May 2009 (and specifically to Adichie and Achebe). Has the rise of Nigerian writing left South African authors behind?
Not so, says Daneet Steffens, well-travelled bibliophile and editor of Mslexia, the magazine for women who write. Daneet believes that the UK offers a relatively solid representation of writing from throughout the Commonwealth via publishers, bookstores and prizes. “What's particularly exciting and vibrant about South African women writers at the moment,” she says, “is that there is a strong multi-generational and multi-ethnic presence, covering an intense and highly-charged time.”
Some of the writers who are particularly exciting to Daneet are Nadine Gordimer, Sindiwe Magona, Gillian Slovo, Pamela Jooste, Zoe Wicomb, Rozena Maart, Gabeba Baderoon and Rachel Zadok. “At a critical moment of the South African story, you've got a chorus of vibrant voices, contributing to a rich, all-encompassing narrative that's still developing.”
I wonder how many of these writers are accessible to the British reading public. In my next blog, I'll be reporting from the high street on the representation of South African authors in our bookstores.
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