Hot from the Press
Halley’s Comet by Hannes Barnard got a great mention in this article about representative YA literature, On My Papa’s Shoulders is a staff pick at the LA County Library, and in case you missed the big news from last week: Idza Luhumyo’s short story “Five Years Next Sunday”, featured in Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa, was awarded the 2022 Caine Prize alongside a record setting shortlist!
Awards News
The Miles Franklin Award pulled John Hughes’ The Dogs from its 2022 longlist after Hughes admitted to plagiarizing Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War. But people are now drawing similarities to other works of classic literature, including The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, and All is Quiet on the Western Front.
Announced this week: the winners of the 2022 Lambda Literary Awards, which celebrate LGBTQ+ literature; Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness takes home the Women’s Prize for Fiction; and The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan and translated from Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler wins the 2022 EBRD Literature Prize.
Costa announced unexpectedly that the 2021 Costa Book Awards were its last, and the Society of Authors announced a new prize, the ACDI Literary Prize, which will celebrate positive representation of disability in literature.
#ReadingAfrica Roundup
In this section, we share publishing news, book recs, and more all focused on African and African diaspora authors. Don’t forget to mark your calendars for our sixth annual #ReadingAfrica Week, this year December 4-10!
Oxford University Press announced that it will produce a new dictionary of “African American English”, the African Publishing Innovation Fund announced its five funding recipients for 2022, and one of the oldest and most beloved Black-owned indies in the USA, Eso Won Books, announced that it will close this year.
In Other News…
Karolina Waclawiak, former editor of literary magazine The Believer,is now Buzzfeed’s top news editor. Israeli literary giant A.B. Yehoshua passed away this week at 85. Authors recommend the 89 best travel books ever written, and speaking of travel: Kaila Boulware Sykes, a bookstore owner in New Jersey, is off for her second 1,000 Free Book Tour, where she drives the length of the East Coast delivering free books to young readers. Thank you, Kaila!
From the Backlist
Bom Boy, Yewande Omotoso’s debut novel which we released to North American audiences in 2019, got a nice shoutout from the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative this week! Bom Boy was the winner of the South African Literary Award First Time Author Prize, and shortlisted for both the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature.
About Bom Boy
Abandoned by his birth mother, losing his adoptive mother to cancer, and failing to connect with his distant adoptive father, Leke—a troubled young man living in Cape Town—has developed some odd and possibly destructive habits: he stalks strangers, steals small objects, and visits doctors and healers in search of friendship. Through a series of letters written to him from prison by his Nigerian father, a man he has never met, Leke learns about the family curse—a curse which his father had unsuccessfully tried to remove. Leke’s search to break the curse leads him to strange places.
Praise for Bom Boy
“Bom Boy is an intricately structured literary novel that powerfully evokes family as a source of loss and struggle, but also of hope.” —Foreword Reviews
“Through three decades, two countries and multiple points of view, a complete picture of Leke’s life in the present slowly surfaces in Yewande Omotoso’s debut novel. […] Despite his quirks, Leke’s plight is curiously engaging as it speaks to the universal yearning to belong somewhere with someone.” —Shelf Awareness
“Omotoso’s concise prose captures the racial complexities of the book’s backdrop while enabling her protagonist to find his own way with her evocative plotting.” —World Literature Today
“[A] story about grief, loneliness, and a hunger for belonging. […] A short and refreshing novel that I very much recommend” —Shelf Unbound
Yewande Omotoso is an architect with a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel Bom Boy was published in South Africa by Modjaji Books in 2011 and was shortlisted for the 2012 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. The Woman Next Door (Chatto and Windus, 2016), Omotoso’s second novel, was published to critical acclaim, and her third book, An Unusual Grief (Cassava Republic), just hit shelves this year. She lives in Johannesburg.
Check out the reading guide for Bom Boy here, and don’t miss Yewande in conversation with Things They Lost author Okwiri Oduor today, where they’ll be discussing their new books and complicated mother-daughter relationships in literature. Register here (or catch up later at the same link).
Bom Boy is currently 10% off on our site and on Bookshop.org!
