Publisher: Malthouse Press, Nigeria
Pages: 228
Year: 2012
Dimensions: 216 x 140 mm
An African Writer in America
The celebrated Nigerian writer Tanure Ojaide relates here his experience of living in the United States where he has been based teaching and writing since 1996. Drawing the Map of Heaven picks up where his earlier memoir, Great Boys. An African Childhood which charted his upbringing in Nigeria by his Grandmother, left off. Less a purely personal tale and more a story of the many other African immigrants in the United States Ojaide in the text uses “we” to speak collectively for a traditionally communal society now residing in an individualistic setting. As much a reflection of an African background as an American experience Drawing the Map of Heaven is a unique portrait of the African in the United States
Price range: £36.00 through £38.00
About the author
A renowned poet, Tanure Ojaide has won major national and international poetry awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1987), the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988), twice the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988 and 1997), and thrice the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Poetry Prize (1988, 1994 and 2004. In 2016 Ojaide was awarded the the prestigious Fonlon-Nichols Award at the 42nd annual African Literature Association (ALA) conference in Atlanta.
For Tanure Ojaide, “the creative writer is never an airplant, but someone who is grounded in some specific place. It is difficult to talk of many writers without their identification with place. Every writer’s roots are very important in understanding his or her work.” He has read from his poetry in different fora in Africa, Britain, Canada, Israel, Mexico, The Netherlands, and the United States. Some of his poems have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, Spanish and French. He is currently the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Visit Tanure Ojaide’s website here: http://www.tanureojaide.com/
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