BookRising

Writer and photographer Maaza Mengiste joined host Bhakti Shringarpure in the studio to discuss the expanding boundaries of African literature today. While the days of African literary tourism are behind us, there still remain significant challenges to overcome in Western publishing. Recent focus on literature from East Africa illustrates that the region's unique literary output often grapples wit...

Novelist, filmmaker and activist Tsitsi Dangarembga joined host Bhakti Shringarpure from Harare, Zimbabwe. Dangarembga was awarded the 2021 PEN Pinter Prize which honors literary merit as well as fierce political commitment. The conversation explored the shape and state of "literature engagée" or the literature of commitment today and Dangarembga said that she sees no choice but to narrate the rea...

Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela spoke with host Bhakti Shringarpure about East African and Sudanese literature, about Abdulrazak Gurnah's Nobel prize win, on writing about Muslim lives and Muslim cultures, and the ways in which the exciting shifts in readership across the Muslim world are shifting publishing paradigms. She commented on the ways in which the events of 9/11 and the ensuing wars alter...

Meg Arenberg is joined by Kenyan novelist Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor to celebrate the momentous occasion of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize, in her words, "a family win." Owuor talks about Gurnah the man and the mentor, the textures of his writing and how it has influenced her own, and reflects on the cartographic imagination that nourishes both poetry and prose born from the Swahili seas. The conversa...

Ainehi Edoro (founder and editor-on-chief of Brittle Paper) & Bhakti Shringarpure (creative director of the Radical Books Collective) decided to break down the power, prestige, history and significance of the Booker Prize. They also discussed the six nominated novels and revealed their favorites. With the Booker prize announcements only one week away, Edoro and Shringarpure will soon find out...

Meg Arenberg speaks with Swahili poet and journalist Mohammed Ghassani about how fellow Zanzibaris have received the news of Abdulrazak Gurnah's Nobel prize, Ghassani's experience living abroad, and how the themes of alienation and longing in Gurnah's novels overlap with Ghassani's poetry, in particular his collection N'na Kwetu (I Have a Home, There is a We), which won him the first Mabati Cornel...

On October 23rd, 2021, we organized our first Radical Foundations seminar on B.R Ambedkar's "Annihilation of Caste." This groundbreaking text was originally written in 1936 as a speech which Ambedkar was subsequently forbidden from delivering. He went on to self-publish it and it soon became a powerful and gut-wrenching indictment of India's caste system rooted in the violence of Hindu scriptures....