Awards

[The JRB Daily] ‘Globally inspiring’ NB Publishers wins AAP International Freedom to Publish Award for Jacques Pauw’s book The President’s Keepers

NB Publishers has been awarded the prestigious AAP International Freedom to Publish Award for Jacques Pauw’s book The President’s Keepers. The…

Africa

[The JRB exclusive] ‘PS. Everybody calls me Binyavanga these days.’ Read Binyavanga Wainaina’s letter to his late mother, from the 2016 exhibition Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison

In 2016, the late Binyavanga Wainaina contributed a piece of writing to a United Kingdom-based art project titled Inside: Artists and…

Africa

Wider than the Black Atlantic—Bongani Madondo listens in on Kwame Brathwaite’s visual sounds of Blackness, from the photo book Black Is Beautiful

Contributing Editor Bongani Madondo unmoors Kwame Brathwaite’s Black Is Beautiful from mono-dimensional notions of the Black Atlantic into a New African Globalism of…

Africa

[Temporary Sojourner] Efemia Chela travels to Sudan with Rania Mamoun’s newly translated collection of short stories, Thirteen Months of Sunrise

The JRB Francophone and Contributing Editor Efemia Chela travels to Sudan with Rania Mamoun’s debut collection of short stories, Thirteen Months of Sunrise,…

Africa

Rough honesty, ample sex and ripe desire—Efemia Chela reads Leïla Slimani’s Adèle, Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love and Melissa Broder’s The Pisces

The JRB Contributing Editor Efemia Chela reads Adèle, Die, My Love and The Pisces, three stirring psychological novels, kindred portraits of contemporary womanhood….

Africa

[The JRB Daily] 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize shortlist announced, including writers from Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia

The shortlist for the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize has been announced.  South African writer Alex Latimer and South Africa-based…

Awards

[The JRB Daily] 2019 Man Booker International Prize shortlist announced—an all-female list of translators, alongside five female authors

The shortlist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, celebrating the ‘finest works of translated fiction from around the world’, has…

Essays

‘Baldwin the symbol of black transgression and global black anger is simply peerless’—Bongani Madondo on If Beale Street Could Talk, the book and Oscar-winning film

James Baldwin’s novel of half a century ago, If Beale Street Could Talk, now reissued by Penguin Random House, was…

Biography & Memoir

Illuminating a mighty poet and a total artist—Rustum Kozain reviews Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution

The JRB Poetry Editor Rustum Kozain reviews David Austin’s new book Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution, finding…

Biography & Memoir

‘It was the only way we could escape our whiteness’—Read ‘Struggle Heroes’, an excerpt from Hugh Lewin’s memoir, Stones Against the Mirror

The JRB presents an excerpt from Stones Against the Mirror, the memoir of journalist, author and anti-apartheid activist Hugh Lewin,…

Academic

[Conversation Issue] ‘Intersectionality seems so blindingly obvious a notion’—Zoë Wicomb in conversation with Andrew van der Vlies, from their new book Race, Nation, Translation

As part of our January Conversation Issue, we present an excerpted interview from a new collection of Zoë Wicomb’s writing, Race,…

Fiction

[Conversation Issue] A brief history of the Igbo civilisation, and a love story—Chigozie Obioma chats to Jennifer Malec about his new novel, An Orchestra of Minorities

As part of our January Conversation Issue, The JRB Editor Jennifer Malec talks to Chigozie Obioma about his forthcoming ‘African cosmological novel’, An Orchestra…