BY SHARON SIBINDI
ONE of the country’s renowned authors and filmmakers, Tsitsi Dangarembga, will raise the country’s flag high as a curator at this year’s edition of the African Book Festival Berlin 2019, scheduled for April 4 to 7 in the German capital.
Dangarembga’s contribution to the development of the film and book industries in the country is immense. She has won several awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa in 1989 for her novel, Nervous Conditions.
At this year’s second edition of the four-day book extravaganza, Dangarembga will share the podium with a compatriot, Bulawayo poet, critic and writer John Eppel.
The festival, which will be held under the theme Transitioning from migration, is an initiative for more diversity, both in literature and politics.
In an interview with NewsDay Life & Style yesterday, Eppel said he was proud to be representing the country at the festival.
“I will be attending the African Book Festival Berlin 2019 scheduled for April 4 to 7 in Berlin, courtesy of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, a left wing educational institution, which was established in Germany in 1990,” he said.
Eppel said he would be a part of the panel alongside other African authors at the festival.
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“I will be on a panel with three other writers and we will attempt to answer the following questions: How does an African author write for the group while standing out from the group?, How does writing practice and the performance of the word encourage an inclusive look on people seen as ‘other’ and who are these people?,” he said.
Some of the books under Eppel’s sleeve are White Man Walking, O Suburbia, The Giraffe Man, The Curse of the Ripe Tomato and The Holy Innocents.
Eppel’s first novel, D.G.G. Berry’s The Great North Road, won the Mnet prize in South Africa and was listed in the weekly Mail & Guardian as one of the best 20 South African books in English, published between 1948 and 1994.
His second novel, Hatchings, was shortlisted for the MNet prize and was chosen for the series in the Times Literary Supplement on the most significant books to have come out of Africa.
