"Say You're One of Them"

November 04, 2009

"Say You're One of Them"

The latest recipient of the coveted Oprah's Book Club seal is a Nigerian author, Uwem Akpan. His debut book "Say You're One of Them" is a collection of five spectacular and "profoundly moving" short stories that are garnering rave reviews from critics and book lovers everywhere. The collection won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, Africa Region, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and has been nominated for various other prestigious literary awards.

Osondu Nnamdi Awaraka will interview Uwem Akpan for Incessant Scribble next week. Don't miss the Interview and Book Review posts!

Keep Reading!!!!

Watch Oprah talk about the profound effect of "Fattening for Gabon", one of the collections' short stories, here and on "An Exmas Feast" here. On monday, November 9, watch Oprah interview him simulcast on Oprah.com, CNN.com and Facebook 9 p.m. ET/8pm (which is 3 a.m./ 2 a.m. 'Nigeria Time').

[Image via Readersread]

5 comments:

MyneNovember 4, 2009 at 11:37 PM
Will look forward to the interview. Well done.
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TemitayoNovember 5, 2009 at 3:38 AM
Good to have you back...
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Osondu Nnamdi AwarakaNovember 5, 2009 at 6:22 AM
@ Myne Whitman -
Thanks for keeping an eye out. I'll get it out as soon as I can.

@Temitayo-
Thank you very much for all your support.
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STANNovember 5, 2009 at 9:16 AM
Am waiting for the review. But don't be in a hurry to hear me say welcome until i see some consistency. and i lost my phone again so number pls even though i never call.
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Osondu Nnamdi AwarakaNovember 7, 2009 at 8:57 PM
@ Stan-
I understand. Thanks.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I still have the newspaper clippings from the July 11, 2004 Sunday Edition of the Nigerian Guardian that I cut out when I first saw Adichie's interview for her debut novel "Purple Hibiscus". I finally got to read "Purple Hibiscus" in 2007 and I finished reading it on the University of Nigeria Shuttle bus headed back to the Nsukka campus from Enugu. I sat in that bus quietly after I had finished reading it, deeply moved by everything I had read and in awe of Adichie. In 2008, my friends (Onyeka Nwelue & Eromo Egbejule) and I walked around the University of Nigeria Nsukka campus searching for the house she and Chinua Achebe once lived in. We found it and we all wrote about our experience individually (for my version of the trip search this blog for "305 Marguerite Cartwright Avenue, University of Nigeria Nsukka"). Adichie represents many things to me. She's incredibly gifted and tremendously inspiring. [Photo: Kachifo Limited]

Some of My Favorite Author Quotes...

"Also, [Nigerians] have a different mentality. Once someone deviates from the 'Go to School - Get a Job - Get a Family' model, he is seen as a delusional fool who is certain to fail and is discouraged at every turn. How is one supposed to make art under such conditions?" - Onyeka Nwelue
"I don't speak to provoke. I speak because I think our time on earth is short and each moment that we are not our truest selves, each moment we pretend to be what we are not, each moment we say what we do not mean because we imagine that is what somebody wants us to say, then we are wasting our time on earth." - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"It is precisely because there are so few novels by African writers in global circulation that we ask those novels to do too much. No one novelist can bear the burden of representing a continent and no one novel should have to." - Taiye Selasi

November 04, 2009