Round-Up 13

On Black Sisters’ Street

A new paperback edition of Chika Unigwe’s book On Black Sisters’ Street  has been published by Vintage Books this week. It is a striking looking cover, but I prefer the original. I however totally agree with the Ali Smith quote that is on the cover: “This powerful book will leave you haunted.“  Read my interview with Chika here: interview.

Ben Okri – Inspired Speaker in Leeds

Booker Prize winning author, Ben Okri is the featured guest for 'An Inspired Talk', as part of the Creative Case Black British Perspectives programme and the last in the current Powerbrokers series, discussing issues around creativity and innovation in culture and the arts, particularly focusing on Black artists as leaders.

The event, at the City Inn Hotel, Granary Wharf, Leeds, will be on 21 September at 6pm for a 6.30m start, and will be chaired by BBC TV presenter, Brenda Emmanus. More information on the SableLitMag facebook page - SableLitMag Do note that the event is free, but you must rsvp as space is limited.

BBC Book Club

Radio 4’s Book for its Book Club November programme will be Blood River by Tim Butcher. The programme will be recorded on Monday 18 October at 5.45pm. Contact www.bbc.co.uk/radioarts/bookclub/ to reserve a place. The Book Club programme is usually aired on the first Sunday of each month at 4pm. Blood River is true story of Butcher’s journey retracing the footsteps of Stanley (of Livingstone fame) along the river Congo. He did this journey at a time when no other British person was travelling through the area because of the civil unrest. Butcher is a former Africa correspondent at the Daily Telegraph – the paper funded the trip. You will have guessed from reading this blog that I have a growing fascination on how some people write about the African nations. This one is both a travel book – of course, and a family memoir of the area. I have mixed feelings about it, and feel sure that I shall be reading it with trepidation.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

The review of this book generated a heated largely off topic conversational thread on The Economist’s website recently. The book by Isabel Wilkerson tells of the 20^th century story of the African-American movement from the former slave based south to the heavily industrialised cities of the northern states.  Wilkerson worked on this book for over 10-years and carried out 1,000s of interviews. Her device was to share the wider general story through the detailed true stories of three black families who ended up in different parts of the States.  I was pleased to see a passing reference to – The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and how it changed America by Nicholas Leman it’s a brilliant read. I don’t think that it was published in the UK, but copies are available – mostly from the US on Amazon.co.uk.

Here is the review of the Wilkerson book in The Economist, but I think if you are considering buying it, then you will get a better sense of what the book is really about from The New Yorker: review.

Faber Academy

The Faber Academy has launched it programme of writer development workshops and events for the autumn/winter season. It includes the Jamaican British author Andrea Stuart leading a course on Writing a Family History. The course takes place at the Faber offices, and begins on 20 January 2011.  It consists of 22-two hour sessions on Thursdays and 6 Saturday day-long workshops.  The course will take in effective research, finding an authorial voice, newspapers and periodicals and archives and much much more.  For more information: Writing Family History: the programme

Andrea Stuart is the author of Josephine: The Rose of Martinique (2004) about Napoleon Bonaparte’s famous lover who was from the tiny Caribbean island. Here is the review that appeared when the book was published: The Rose of Martinique review.

Andrea’s next book – Sugar in the Blood: one family’s history of slavery and Empire will be published in 2011. (Great title – not only does it capture the sugar that most black people in the Caribbean worked, it’s also the expression that is used today to describe diabetes, which so many suffer from in their later years – there, in the US and UK.