Olujide Agboola was born in Onipe, a village in the Oluyole local council of Oyo State, Nigeria, in the early sixties. he attended Prospect High School, Abanla in the same local council He later trained as a graphic artist at The Polytechnic, Ibadan. He did his NYSC programme in the old Bendel State. Worked as graphic artist and later as cartoonist and rose to the level of an assistant editor. He holds GND and PGD (Mass Comm.) certificates From The Polytechnic, Ibadan, Oyo State. He lives ...

"[An] elegantly written mix of complex history, riveting memoir and damning exposé," from this award-winning Sierra Leonean author ( Publishers Weekly).As a child, Aminatta Forna was witness to the political upheaval and social unrest of post-colonial Africa. Forced to flee her home for exile in Britain, she was subject to the consequences of her dissident father's actions.After war had abated in Sierra Leone, Aminatta's father, Mohamed, returned t...

In a world first, almost incredibly, Riaan Manser rode a bicycle right around the continent of Africa. It took him two years, two months and fifteen days. He rode 36 500 kilometres through 34 different countries. In Around Africa on my Bicycle, Manser tells the story of this epic journey. It is a story of blood, sweat, toil and tears. It is a story of triumph and occassional disaster. Of nights out under the stars, of searing heat and rain, of endless miles of Africa and of pressing on and...

When I was 10, I was taken from my quiet, safe corner of old Europe and deposited into an exotic new world. Africa, at once breathtaking and soul-destroying, from the snow-capped mountains and teeming game plains of Kenya and Tanzania to the haunted hunger-stalked dustbowls of Ethiopia and the Sudan – the hideous and the magnificent have always gone hand in hand there.Nobody who has once set foot on the soil of Africa will ever be quite free of it again. When I first went there, I ...

A “remarkable chronicle” of a journey back to this West African nation after years of exile (The New York Times Book Review).Noo Saro-Wiwa was brought up in England, but every summer she was dragged back to visit her father in Nigeria—a country she viewed as an annoying parallel universe where she had to relinquish all her creature comforts and sense of individuality. After her father, activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was killed there, she didn’t return for several years. Then she ...

The first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as a political activist of prodigious energies, Wole Soyinka now follows his modern classic Ake: The Years of Childhood with an equally important chronicle of his turbulent life as an adult in (and in exile from) his beloved, beleaguered homeland.In the tough, humane, and lyrical language that has typified his plays and novels, Soyinka captures the indomitable spirit of Nigeria itself by bringing to life the friends...

Celebrating ten years of the leading literary prize for African fiction (dubbed "The African Booker"), 10 Years of the Caine Prize brings together the ten winning stories along with a story each from the four African winners of the Booker Prize: Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Ben Okri.The ten winners:Leila Aboulela for The MuseumHelon Habila for Love PoemsBinyavanga Wainaina for Discovering HomeYvon...

MY FIRST COUP D'ETAT is a literary nonfiction account that charts the coming of age of John Dramani Mahama in Ghana during the dismal post-independence "lost decades" of Africa. He was seven years old when rumors of that first coup reached his boarding school in Accra. His father was suddenly missing. "It is sometimes incorrectly referred to in texts as a bloodless coup, yet it was anything but," Mahama writes. "They tried, as best they could, with smiles and toffee, to shield me from thei...

This is the long-awaited biography of the great humanist historian of eighteenth-century Ireland. Carlow landlord, writer and political commentator, Lecky achieved fame in his lifetime as the author of monumental works of Irish, English and European history, and saw himself as heir to the great tradition of colonial nationalism vested in Swift, Burke and Grattan. A classic Victorian intellectual, he championed rationalism, loathed bigotry and was an admirer of Daniel O'Connell. In later li...

Part diary and part reportage, The Soccer War is a remarkable chronicle of war in the late twentieth century. Between 1958 and 1980, working primarily for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuscinski covered twenty-seven revolutions and coups in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Here, with characteristic cogency and emotional immediacy, he recounts the stories behind his official press dispatches—searing firsthand accounts of the frightening, grotesque, and comically absurd aspe...

Identity, belonging and voyages of personal discovery are but some of the themes inventively explored in Antjie Krog’s first full-length work to appear in English since the publication of Country of My Skull. In times of fundamental change, people tend to find a space, lose it and then find another space as life and the world transform around them. What does this metamorphosis entail and in what ways are we affected by it? How do we live through it and what may we become on our journey tow...

Praised on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in the author’s native Uganda, Moses Isegawa’s first novel Abyssinian Chronicles was a “big, transcendently ambitious book” (Boston Globe) that “blasts open the tidy borders of the conventional novel and redraws the literary map to reveal a whole new world” (Elle).In Snakepit, Isegawa returns to the surreal, brutalizing landscapes of his homeland during the time of dictator Idi Amin...