Modern African Writing
About Modern African Writing
The Modern African Writing series will bring the best African writing to an international audience. These groundbreaking novels, memoirs, and other literary works will showcase the most talented writers of the African continent. The series will also feature works of significant historical and literary value translated into English for the first time. Moderately priced, the books chosen for the series will be well-crafted, original, and ideally suited for African studies classes, world literature classes, or any reader looking for compelling voices of diverse African perspectives.
All Titles
Paper Sons and Daughters
Growing up Chinese in South Africa
By Ufrieda HoThis memoir attracted considerable attention when it was first published in South Africa in 2011, and it will resonate with anyone interested in the worldwide Chinese diaspora. It tells the story of a stowaway, Ho Sing Kee, who hid for long weeks aboard a ship crossing the Indian Ocean.…
Available August 2012 (est.)
Dog Eat Dog
A Novel
By Niq MhlongoDog Eat Dog is a remarkable record of being young in a nation undergoing tremendous turmoil, and provides a glimpse into South Africa’s pivotal kwaito (South African hip-hop) generation and life in Soweto.…
Available July 2012 (est.)
The Conscript
A Novel of Libya’s Anticolonial War
By Gebreyesus HailuTranslated by Ghirmai Negash
Eloquent and thought-provoking, this classic novel by the Eritrean novelist Gebreyesus Hailu, written in Tigrinya in 1927 and published in 1950, is one of the earliest novels written in an African language and will have a major impact on the reception and critical appraisal of African literature.…
On Black Sisters Street
A Novel
By Chika UnigweOn Black Sisters Street tells the haunting story of four very different women who have left their African homeland for the riches of Europe—and who are thrown together by bad luck and big dreams into a sisterhood that will change their lives.…
After Tears
By Niq MhlongoBafana Kuzwayo is a young man with a weight on his shoulders. After flunking his law studies at the University of Cape Town, he returns home to Soweto, where he must decide how to break the news to his family.…
Welcome to Our Hillbrow
A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa
By Phaswane MpeWelcome to Our Hillbrow is an exhilarating and disturbing ride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow—microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring, and painful in the postapartheid South African psyche.…
