HOME > PENGUIN PRIZE FOR AFRICAN WRITING
Penguin Prize for African Writing
The 2010 winners’
books now available
ELLEN BANDA-AAKU
Fiction Winner
That I adopted Tata’s surname didn’t stop Grandma Ponga triumphantly telling the story of what she did to him that day – though as I grew old enough to understand she would always lower her voice or look around to make sure that I wasn’t about before she began. But with all her wisdom, she made a mistake; she misjudged my level of intuition. For, from the very first time I heard Grandma Ponga tell the story, with me strapped to her with a chitenge - my cheek squashed against her sticky, pulsating back - I knew. Even though I was too young to understand, I knew. I knew that I was bad seed.
ABOUT PATCHWORKDestined from birth to inhabit two very different worlds – that of her father, the wealthy Joseph Sakavungo, and that of her mother, his mistress – this emotive tale takes us to the heart of a young girl’s attempts to come to terms with her own identity and fashion a future for herself from the patchwork of the life she was born into.
Beautifully constructed, warm and wise, this is a novel that will transport the reader to a world in which we can all become more of the sum of our parts.
THE AUTHOR
Ellen Banda-Aaku has lived, studied and worked in Ghana, South Africa, the UK and Zambia. She has published three books for children and her short stories have appeared in anthologies published in Australia, South Africa and the US.
Ellen Banda-Aaku has lived, studied and worked in Ghana, South Africa, the UK and Zambia. She has published three books for children and her short stories have appeared in anthologies published in Australia, South Africa and the US.
In 2004 she won the Macmillan Writers’ Prize for Africa for Wandi’s Little Voice, a book for children. In 2007, her short story, Sozi’s Box was the overall winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Short Story Competition.
Ellen has three university degrees and currently lives in the UK with her two children.
PIUS ADESANMI
Non-Fiction Winner
Non-Fiction Winner
ABOUT YOU’RE NOT A COUNTRY, AFRICAIn this groundbreaking collection of essays Pius Adesanmi tries to unravel what it is that Africa means to him as an African, and by extension to all those who inhabit this continent of extremes. This is a question that exercised some of the continent’s finest minds in the twentieth century, but which pan-Africanism, Negritude, nationalism, decolonisation and all the other projects through which Africans sought to restore their humanity ultimately failed to answer. Criss-crossing the continent, Pius Adesanmi engages with the enigma that is Africa in an attempt to make meaning of this question for all twenty-first century Africans.
THE AUTHOR
Nigerian born Pius Adesanmi is an acclaimed literary and cultural critic. He currently resides in Ottawa, Canada, where he teaches literature and African studies at Carleton University. He is one of Nigeria’s major intellectuals and writes two weekly columns for the influential Sahara Reporters and NEXT newspaper. His first book, The Wayfarer and Other Poems, won the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Poetry Prize in 2001.
