TAN TWAN ENG

Tan Twan Eng is a Malaysian poet, lawyer, writer, author, poet lawyer, and novelist. He is best known for his 2012 book
The Garden of Evening Mists which won the Man Asian Literary Prize and Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and
was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, making Tan the first Malaysian to be recognised by all three awards.

Tan was born on January 1, 1972, in Penang, Malaysia, and was raised there. He is of Chinese Straits heritage. Tan can
speak Cantonese and some Penang Hokkien in addition to English.

Tan earned a law degree from the University of London and later worked as a lawyer and solicitor at one of Kuala
Lumpur's top law companies before deciding to devote himself full-time to writing. He holds a first-dan aikido rank.
After spending a year traveling throughout South Africa, he now resides in Cape Town and is writing his second book.

CARREER of Tan Twan Eng

Literary Pieces

The Gift of Rain

his debut book, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and released in 2007. The Gift of Rain is an English novel that
has been translated into 9 languages Italian, Spanish, Greek, Romanian, Czech, Serbian, French, Russian, and
Hungarian. It is set in Penang before and during the Japanese occupation of Malaya in World War II.

The Garden of Evening Mist

his second book, was released in 2012. It was named to the 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlist and was awarded the
Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in addition to the Man Asian Literary Prize. The novel was made into a movie
that was released in 2020 and starred Hiroshi Abe, Lee Sinje, John Hannah, David Oakes, and Sylvia Chang.

Tan has spoken at literary festivals, including the Singapore Writers Festival, the Ubud Writers Festival in Bali, the Asia
Man Booker Festival in Hong Kong, the Shanghai International Literary Festival, the Perth Writers Festival, the
Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, Australia, the Franschhoek Literary Festival in South Africa, the Borders Book
Festival in Melrose, Scotland, the George Town Literary Festival in Penang, the Head Read Literary Festival in Tallinn,
and many more.

He is one of the judges of the International Booker Prize 2023, the first Malaysian author to be appointed that role.

Interesting Facts About Tan Twan Eng

Even though he become an ambassador for Malaysian Literature on a global stage because of Man Asain literary prize
in March. He don't see himself as an ambassador of Malaysian Literature. he would prefer to just be known as a writer,
a Malaysian writer.

His first drafts go to a couple of close friends who enjoy reading and are brutally frank. They are able to tell him what
does not work and why: a character is acting out of character; a passage is inconsistent with what he is trying to
portray; a scene is stagnant and does not move the plot at all; or the book sags in the middle section.

It took him three years to find a publisher for the Garden of Evening Mist, which is about aged Philip Hutton, the son of
an English father and a Chinese mother, who recalls being torn between loyalty to aikido master Hayato Endo, the
Japanese diplomat who influenced his formative years in pre-war Penang, and love for family and country, as he sits
and talks to Endo’s former lover who is visiting from Japan.

Tan aims to keep evolving his style but still loves the richness of language, and reading and playing with it. He
believes that a writer can only write what he knows of in the present, but he can ensure his work remains fresh to later
generations by weaving his message into the characters and their thoughts.

Criticism raises his heckles but he has learnt to listen to why someone thinks a sentence is not good enough and try
out suggestions.

Text's Context

The Garden of Evening Mist

Summary
The Garden of Evening Mists begins in 1980, as Judge Teoh Yun Ling announces her retirement. She is younger than
most judges when she retires, and this surprises her peers on Malaysia’s Supreme Court. What she’s not telling anyone
about her retirement is that she’s been diagnosed with a degenerative neurological condition Ling was the third child
of an affluent Malaysian family, but their life was completely upended when the Japanese invaded their country.
Malaysia was one of the first places the Japanese invaded right after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Ling and her
parents fled the city along with her sister, Yun Hong. However, they were caught by soldiers who brutally beat the
girls’ parents and took Ling and Hong captive along with a large group of child prisoners.

Ling was the third child of an affluent Malaysian family, but their life was completely upended when the Japanese
invaded their country. Malaysia was one of the first places the Japanese invaded right after the attack on Pearl Harbor,
and Ling and her parents fled the city along with her sister, Yun Hong. However, they were caught by soldiers who
brutally beat the girls’ parents and took Ling and Hong captive along with a large group of child prisoners.

The girls were taken to a prison camp, where they were treated brutally. Hong, a beautiful girl, was forced to work in
the camp brothel where she was regularly raped by Japanese soldiers. Ling realized that the only way to survive was to
be useful, so she got a job in the camp kitchen, where she was able to sneak out food to her sister. She was caught
one day, and a cruel guard cut off two of her gingers. Ling and Hong tried to stay positive by visualizing a beautiful
Japanese garden that they once saw on a trip, and by escaping the daily cruelty of their lives. After the camp’s
interpreter died, an officer named Tominaga Noburu made Ling his personal interpreter. He was kinder than most
officers at the camp, and when it became clear the Japanese were going to lose the war, he took her out of the camp
and told her to escape.

She refused to leave Hong and tried to make her way back to the camp to rescue her, but when she arrived she saw a
massive explosion set by Tominaga and knew the camp would have no survivors. She was found by an aboriginal boy
who helped her to safety, and she immediately volunteered her services to work in the post-war judicial system. She
watched as Japanese officers were tried for war crimes, and she desperately tried to find the location of the prison
camp she was stationed at so the prisoners could be properly buried.

Ling went to visit friends who owned a tea plantation and met a Japanese man named Aritomo. He was the former
gardener of the Emperor, and had an elaborate garden named Yugiri. Ling asked him to create a garden in Hong’s
memory, but he refused. He did, however, offer to teach her gardening so she could do it herself. They slowly became
friends, and one day he asked her for permission to give her a horimono, a ceremonial tattoo that would cover her
back. She agreed, and when he finished with the design, he went for a walk in the woods and never returned,
essentially leaving his house to Ling. She stayed there for a while until she left to follow her passion in the law.

The story then returns to the present, as Ling heads to Yugiri after retirement. Although she generally turns anyone
who visits away from the garden, she agrees to hear out Professor Yoshikawa Tatsuji, a respected Japanese author. He
wants to write a book about Aritomo’s wood carvings. As they talk, Tatsuji reveals that he knows a lot about Aritomo,
including his role for the Japanese government as the man who would hide stolen valuables. She realizes that Tatsuji
believes she’ s the key - the map on her back is the key to where he hid the valuables. The garden itself holds many
clues, and she knows that the time is right to change the garden she’ s preserved so carefully. She turns the garden
into a memorial to both Aritomo and her sister, and muses that one day she’ll walk into the woods and disappear, just
like he did.

The Garden of Evening Mist

The Garden of Evening Mists is the second English-language novel by Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng, first published
in November 2011. This is a novel about memory, things remembered and things denied, and about loyalty.The book
follows protagonist Teoh Yun Ling, who was a prisoner of the Japanese during the World War II, and later became a
judge overseeing war crimes cases. Seeking after the war to create a garden in memory of her sister, who was
imprisoned with her but did not survive, she ends up serving as an apprentice to a Japanese gardener in Cameron
Highlands for several months during the Malayan Emergency. As the story begins, years later, she is trying to make
sense of her life and experiences.

The novel takes place during three different time periods: the late 1980s, when the main character returns to the
Japanese garden, Yugiri, of her apprenticeship and begins to write her memoir; the early 1950s, when the main events
of the novel took place; and World War II, which provides the backdrop for the story.

Critical reception for the book was generally favourable. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and awarded the Man
Asian Literary Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It was adapted into a feature film by HBO Asia in
partnership with three other production companies and released in 2019.

Social Context
Drawing upon the aesthetics of Japanese gardening and theories of garden art, it examines how the novel presents the
human-nature relationship in garden-making and argues that the novel suggests the complementarity of nature and
human artifice in gardening. Japanese gardening, which is related to the Taoist concept of yinyang and the Zen
Buddhist notion of impermanence, together with its principle of shakkei (borrowed landscape), points to the
combination of anthropocentric and ecocentric relationships with nature. Since the novel presents the protagonist’s life
in two different time periods, this paper investigates her changing attitude towards the garden.

It first analyzes the way in which she conceives of Japanese gardening when she starts her apprenticeship with
Aritomo and then examines how her experience of gardening under his tutelage alters her notion of the garden. In
addition, the paper focuses on the ethical implications of her experience. Because Japanese aesthetics is interwoven
with ways of living, it discusses how the protagonist’s apprenticeship transforms her mind and opens up ways of
coping with her traumatic memories.

Examining her perception of nature and the garden during the closing stage of her life when she starts being attacked
by aphasia and writing her memoir, the paper argues that gardening and the changing gardenscape induce her to
comprehend impermanence and moral ambiguity in human life as well as the complementary co-existence of memory
and forgetting,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Writer's Context

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

a Nigerian writer whose works include novels, short stories and nonfiction. Early in life Adichie, the fifth of six children,
moved with her parents to Nsukka, Nigeria. Adichie was born on Sept. 15,1977 in the city of Enugu in Nigeria, the fifth
of six children in an Igbo family. Nigerian author whose work drew extensively on the Biafran war in Nigeria during the
late 1960s.

Adichie completed her secondary education at the University of Nigeria Secondary School, Nsukka, where she received
several academic prizes. At the age of 19, Adichie left Nigeria for the United States to study communications and
political science at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She studied medicine and pharmacy at the
University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the
university's Catholic medical students.

In 1998 Adichie’s play For Love of Biafra was published in Nigeria. She later dismissed it as “an awfully melodramatic
play,” but it was among the earliest works in which she explored the war in the late 1960s between Nigeria and its
secessionist Biafra republic.

Americanah (2013) centres on the romantic and existential struggles of a young Nigerian woman studying (and
blogging about race) in the United States. In 2008 Adichie received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. The following
year she released The Thing Around Your Neck, a critically acclaimed collection of short stories.

Literary Piece

Americanah

Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who lives in Princeton, New Jersey, gets her hair braided in preparation for her upcoming
return to Nigeria. She has broken up with her boyfriend, Blaine, closed her popular blog about race, and uprooted her
life because she feels weighed down. When she thinks of returning to Nigeria, she can’t help but think of Obinze, her
first love, now a wealthy man in Lagos with a wife and daughter. Upon receiving an email from Ifemelu, Obinze
becomes distracted. He has stumbled into wealth after his cousin introduces him to a well-connected man. His wife,
Kosi, is beautiful and adoring, but they never connected on the emotional level that he and Ifemelu did. That night, he
listens to the music he and Ifemelu used to listen to when they made love.

The novel flashes back to Ifemelu’s youth. She and Obinze meet at a party where a friend attempts to set Obinze up
with a girl named Ginika. Obinze has admired Ifemelu from afar since transferring to their school, and they
immediately hit it off. They date all throughout secondary school and through the start of university. However,
university lecturer strikes keep closing the universities, and Obinze and Aunty Uju encourage Ifemelu to apply to
school in America. Ifemelu is accepted and then quickly approved for a student visa. Ifemelu and Obinze plan to one
day reunite in America.

Unfortunately, Ifemelu’s student visa does not allow her to work, and without a full scholarship and stipend, Ifemelu
must find a source of income. She applies to jobs using a family friend’ s social security card to no avail. In
desperation, she agrees to work for a shady tennis coach as his “relaxation assistant,” which involves allowing him to
touch her sexually. After one meeting, she never returns to the coach. Out of shame and self-loathing, she stops
replying to Obinze’s messages and emails.

Ifemelu’s luck changes when Ginika introduces her to Kimberly, a white woman who needs a babysitter. The steady
work offers her a chance to focus on her studies. She meets Kimberly’s wealthy cousin, Curt, who is immediately
smitten with her. They start dating, and when Ifemelu graduates, Curt helps her get a job that will sponsor her green
card. For the job interview, Ifemelu needs to have her hair relaxed so that it will look professional according to
American standards.

The relaxer burns her scalp, and her friend Wambui encourages her to try wearing her hair natural. At first, Ifemelu
thinks her hair is ugly, but soon grows to love it. One day, she runs into a friend from Nigeria, who asks what happened
between her and Obinze. She gives him the cold shoulder, and is upset the rest of the day. Although she explains that
the university friend was not an ex-boyfriend, Curt acts possessive.

Meanwhile, Obinze lives as an illegal immigrant in London. His American visa application was rejected because of anti-
terror panic after the September 11, 2001 attacks. His mother offers to bring him as a research assistant on a trip to
London as a way to get him into Britain. Obinze’s friend links him up with a fellow Nigerian, Vincent, who is willing to
let him use his national insurance card in order to work if Obinze will give him a percentage of his income. Obinze
agrees and finds a job in a warehouse.
Eventually, Vincent demands more money. Obinze refuses, and the next day his boss tells him that someone reported
him as an illegal immigrant. Desperate, Obinze tries to find someone to arrange a green card marriage for him. The
day Obinze’s wedding is meant to take place, he arrives to the courthouse only to find the police awaiting him. Obinze
is deported.

Ifemelu cheats on Curt and ends their relationship. After she writes an email to Wambui detailing her frustration with
Curt’s inability to understand the necessity of Essence magazine in a world of beauty magazines catering to white
women, Wambui suggests Ifemelu start blogging. Ifemelu starts a blog focusing on her observations on race in
America as a non-American black woman, and her clever posts soon lead to its popularity.

At a conference for minority bloggers, she runs into Blaine, a black American professor at Yale. They begin dating, and
Ifemelu moves in with him. When Ifemelu does not attend a protest Blaine organizes against the university’s racial
profiling of a black staff member, they have a major fight and almost break up. However, Barack Obama’s presidential
candidacy draws them back together and gives them a joint mission up until the election, and Ifemelu’s subsequent
decision to leave.

Aunty Uju calls Ifemelu to tell her that her son, Dike, tried to kill himself. Ifemelu rushes to be with him. Once she’s
back in Nigeria, Ifemelu slowly finds her feet. However, she is hesitant to contact Obinze. Finally, she texts him, and he
wants to meet up with her as soon as possible. Their attraction is still undeniable. When Obinze asks her why she cut
him off, Ifemelu tells him the story of the tennis coach, surprised at her own tears. Obinze holds her hand, and she
basks in the safety she feels.

After more dates, Ifemelu awkwardly rekindles their sexual relationship, although she does not want to be his mistress.
They argue, and Ifemelu calls Obinze a coward for not divorcing Kosi. Shaken, Obinze thinks about Ifemelu’s
accusation, and finds truth in it. He asks Kosi for a divorce. Kosi tries to ignore his declaration, reminding him that he
has a duty to his family. Obinze decides that he doesn’t want his daughter to grow up with her parents only playing
the roles of happy husband and wife. Days later, he shows up at Ifemelu’s flat telling her that he has left Kosi, will
continue to be present in his daughter’s life, and wants to be with Ifemelu. Ifemelu invites him in.

Text Context

Americanah is a 2013 novel by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for which Adichie won the 2013 U.S.
National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Americanah tells the story of a young Nigerian woman, Ifemelu, who
immigrated to the United States to attend university. The novel traces Ifemelu's life in both countries, threaded by her
love story with high school classmate Obinze. It was Adichie's third novel, published on May 14, 2013 by Alfred A.
Knopf. A television miniseries, starring and produced by Lupita Nyong'o, was in development for HBO Max, but then
was later dropped.

Socio-cultural Context

The novel draws inspiration partially from her experiences in the United States throughout college, and those of
friends. Like her character Ifemelu, Adichie was taken aback at being considered black in the United States and the
negativity associated with the label.

Former president Barack Obama included Americanah on his list of books by “a number of Africa’s best writers and
thinkers,” a collection he compiled in 2018 in preparation for his first visits to Kenya and South Africa since his time in
office.

On that list, Americanah joins Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart , one of the undisputed classics of Nigerian literature
After Nigeria’s independence from the British Empire in 1960, the country faced a series of military coups, and the
government passed from one general to another. The resulting instability had catastrophic effects for the nation’s
infrastructure.

Poor working conditions and late payments for the staffs of the universities caused strikes, and universities closed for
months at a time. Amidst this chaos, many Nigerians chose to immigrate to countries like the United States and Britain
in search of opportunities. Adichie has said that she wanted to depict this kind of immigration in Americanah , one of
middle-class immigrants on a quest for more opportunities instead of fleeing danger. In 1998, the then head of state,
General Abubakar, brought forward a new plan to return Nigeria’s power to an elected president. The 1999 elections
proceeded as planned, bringing Obasanjo to power. However, corruption and conflict still plagued the country all of
which enable her to forgive the Japanese transgressors and to make peace with the painful past.
Miguel Syjuco

ILUSTRADO

• Was written and Originally published on 2008.

• Published: May 2010

• Ilustrado won the Grand Prize for a Novel in English at the 2008 Palanca Awards, the Philippines' highest literary
honor.

• In 2010, the novel won the QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, Quebec's top literary prize, and was a
New York Times Notable Book of 2010

The novel is primarily narrated in the first person in the present tense by the protagonist, also named Miguel Syjuco.
For ease of analysis, throughout this guide the author of the novel will be referred to as "Syjuco," while the fictional
protagonist will be referred to as "Miguel." Miguel is an aspiring Filipino writer in his thirties who is estranged from his
grandparents, and who was orphaned at a young age as his parents were killed for political reasons.

TEXT CONTEXT

Miguel Syjuco, begins with that most familiar of plot devices: a body in a river. In this case, the corpse is that of Crispin
Salvador, a once-celebrated novelist in his native Philippines, who meets his end in the Hudson in New York. His death
is most keenly felt by his student, enigmatically also called Miguel Syjuco, who returns to Manila to investigate the
cause of Salvador’s death and find his teacher’s missing manuscript, which he hopes will restore Salvador’s reputation.
Despite the premise, Ilustrado is not a literary thriller. Instead, it has wider pretensions in both form and content.

SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT

The novel, Ilustrado seek to create a clear understanding of the development, challenges and limitations of Philippine
literature, with a focus on its fiction in English, and its relationship with Philippine society. The Philippine literature in
English (PLE) is as Filipino as writing in the native languages; that in today’s world a novel can, and in many cases
should, be rich enough to appeal to a local and international audience. Ilustrado, the novel, was written expressly with
the issues of Philippine literature and society in mind and addresses questions of authenticity, relevance, language,
thematic recurrence, meta-narrative and the current place of PLE in international writing.

READER’S CONTEXT

Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado is the novel made for re-reading. There are continual twists and turns and questions about
the nature of fiction writing that immediately attune one to the constructed nature of the textual landscape. Indeed,
Ilustrado is a metafiction, as it involves a character by the name of Miguel, a writer living in New York, who is
researching the life of a Filipino expatriate writer named Crispin Salvador.

Ilustrado contains some excellent writing. Miguel Syjuco handles each of the individual components well and obviously
has put a great deal of planning into his novel’s construction. Parts are entertaining, in the way that novelties are
entertaining. He even succeeds in establishing a sense of the national culture: particularly that of the capital city,
Manila. But ultimately, there is too much going on at once. “The whole is not equal to the sum of its parts”. In the case
of Ilustrado, I’d go so far as to say that the sum of those parts obscures the whole.

THE AUTHOR

• Miguel Augusto Gabriel Jalbuena Syjuco

• A Filipino author, journalist, civil society advocate, and professor at New York University Abu Dhabi.

• He was born on November 17, 1976

• He is the son of Representative Augusto Syjuco Jr. of the second district of Iloilo in the Philippine House of
Representatives, and Judy Jalbuena.

• He studied English Literature at the Ateneo de Manila University in 2000, and for an MFA from Columbia University in
2004.

• In early 2011 he completed a PhD in literature from the University of Adelaide.

• He was a fellow of the 1998 Silliman National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete, Negros Oriental.
• He is currently a visiting professor in the Literature and Creative Writing department at New York University Abu
Dhabi.

• He is a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times. He was previously a copy editor at The
Independent Weekly (Australia) and The Montreal Gazette

• Dr. Syjuco has written for many of the world’s most respected publications and spoken on Philippine politics and
culture at the World Forum for Democracy and the World Economic Forum.

• Both his fiction and non-fiction focus on politics, history, inequality, cultural identity, literature, and formal
experimentation. He calls Manila home.

Literary Pieces:

Illustrado

Illustrato

I Was the President's Mistress!! (2022)

Jeet Thayil

▪ An Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician.

▪ Born on October 13, 1959 in Mamalassery, Kerala, India.

▪ Masters in Fine Arts From Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

▪ Recipient of grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Swiss Arts Council, the British Council
and the Rockefeller Foundation

▪ Best known as a poet.

▪ Author of four collections: Tranquebar (2008), English (2004), Apocalypso (1997), and Gemini (1992)

▪ Editor of Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets in 2008, 60 Indian Poets in 2008, and a collection of essays,
Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora in 2006.

▪ His poetry is included in Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry (United States, 2015)

▪ Author of Libretto for the Opera Babur in London, commissioned by the UK-based Opera Group with music by the
Zürich-based British composer Edward Rushton

▪ One half of the contemporary music project Sridhar/Thayil ▪ Guitarist for the psychedelic rock band Atomic Forest in
the early 1980s

His first novel is The Narcopolis that was published in 2012.

▪ The Narcopolis made him won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Also shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker
Prize and The Hindu Literary Prize (2013).

▪ Thayil's poetry collection These Errors are Correct was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for English (2012)
Writer’s Context Jeet Thayil

▪ Thayil did not trouble his mind with the concerns of many Indian poets, their Indianness, that he did not make
statements that were irrelevant to his work, that his concerns were mainly personal. Works his feelings out with care,
through colorations of mood rather than through explicit statements.

Literary Pieces

• Narcopolis

• These Errors are Correct

• The Book of Chocolate Saints

• Low

• Names of the Women

• English

Narcopolis Narcopolis is the debut novel of Indian author Jeet Thayil, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker
Prize. It is set in 1970s Old Bombay and concerns opium and its influence. The novel's narrator arrives in Bombay,
where he becomes seduced into the opium underground. The story expands to encompass such characters as Dimple,
a hijra, Rashid, the opium house's owner, and Mr Lee, a former Chinese officer, all of whom have stories to tell.

Text Context

Narcopolis is a novel of drugs and crime that follows a cast of characters over the course of 30-some years in their
Bombay slum. The novel itself is told in both first and third-person, in a kind of stream-of-consciousness that is often
suddenly interrupted by new events and new narrators. The book is about the lives of a few people, bound together by
a common passion – Opium, and about Bombay, in a way we have never heard of before. Bombay is stripped off its
glamour, riches, beaches, skylines and we are taken to Shuklaji Street, to Rashid’s opium den, and are impelled to see
the other side of Bombay.

SOCIO-CULTURAL

The English language is what Jeet Thayil used on his novel Narcopolis, it has also German and Polish translation.
Narcopolis was originally published in April 2012, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. The novel is
about Bombay in the late 70s, 80s and 90s and the author wanted it to be a memorial to a vanished city and to people
he knew there.

He decided to call it Narcopolis, because Bombay seemed to him a city of intoxication, where the substances on offer
were not only drugs and alcohol, but also god, glamour, power, money and sex. He called Bombay Narcopolis because
the city was built on opium shipped to China by the British East India Company working with a small group of Parsi ship
owners - a secret history omitted by most history books.
NADINE GORDIMER

● Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) was a South African writer and political activist.

● Gordimer began writing at the age of nine and was just 15 years old when her first work was published.

● Nadine Gordimer's works include novels, short stories, and essays.

● The stories of individuals are always at the center of her narratives, in relation Gordimer studied for a year at
the University of the Witwatersrand, where she mixed for the first time with fellow professionals across the
color bar

● Gordimer studied for a year at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she mixed for the first time with
fellow professionals across the colour bar

● South African novelist and short-story writer whose major theme was exile and alienation

● Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime,
works such as Burger's Daughter and July's People were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid
movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned, and gave
Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defense speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life.

● During the struggle years in South Africa, Gordimer was an activist against literary and other censorship as
well as a leading member of COSAW (the Congress of South African Writers), which strove to develop young
Black writers and to promote alternative cultural expression. After the fall of apartheid and South Africa’s first
democratic elections in 1994, Gordimer also became an advocate in her country’s fight against the pandemic
spread of HIV and AIDS.

● Gordimer's first novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953.

● Gordimer had a daughter, Oriane (born 1950), by her first marriage in 1949 to Gerald Gavron, a local dentist,
from whom she was divorced within three years.[14] In 1954, she married Reinhold Cassirer, a highly
respected art dealer who established the South African Sotheby's and later ran his own gallery; their
"wonderful marriage"[7] lasted until his death from emphysema in 2001. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955,
and is a filmmaker in New York, with whom Gordimer collaborated on at least two documentaries.

● Gordimer achieved lasting international recognition for her works, most of which deal with political issues, as
well as the "moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country." Virtually all of Gordimer's
works deal with themes of love and politics, particularly concerning race in South Africa. Always questioning
power relations and truth, Gordimer tells stories of ordinary people, revealing moral ambiguities and choices.
Her characterization is nuanced, revealed more through the choices her characters make than through their
claimed identities and beliefs. She also weaves in subtle details within the characters' names.

● Gordimer died in her sleep on 13 July 2014 at the age of 90.

THE PICK UP

Originally published: September 2001

Author: Nadine Gordimer

Genres: Novel, Domestic Fiction

● The Pickup is a 2001 novel by South African writer Nadine Gordimer. It tells the story of a couple: Julie
Summers, a white woman from a financially secure family, and Abdu, an illegal Arab immigrant in South Africa.
After Abdu's visa is refused, the couple returns to his unnamed homeland, where she is the alien. Her
experiences and growth as an alien in another culture form the heart of the work.

● The Pickup considers the issues of displacement, alienation, and immigration, class and economic power,
religious faith, and the ability of people to see and love across these divides. This novel won the 2002
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Best Book from Africa.

Description of the story:

 The Pickup is a 2001 romantic novel by South African author Nadine Gordimer. Set in both South Africa and an
unnamed country, it follows the couple Julie Summers and Ibrahim ibn Musa (or “Abdu”), who are left with no choice
but to move to Abdu’s homeland after his South African visa application is denied. Having both met and lived for years
in South Africa, Julie and Abdu’s relationship is uprooted along with them. In Abdu’s North African country, the tides of
identity are turned: Julie is now an immigrant, striving to adapt to their new culture. The novel feature themes of
identity, displacement, spirituality, xenophobia, and wealth inequality, but shows that love can survive alienation and
anxiety in the globalizing world. The Pickup was awarded Best Book from Africa in the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’
Awards.

TEXT CONTEXT

The Pickup is a book published in 2001 under Bloomsbury Press in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US.
This book deals with issues of race and class, bureaucratic arbitrariness, and the connection between the private and
the political, but it raises these issues from a local or national to a global level, with the story's setting shifting from
liberal post-apartheid Johannesburg to an unnamed Arab country in the novel's second and longer section.

The Pickup is a testament to the fact that love can not only survive, but flourish, in a globalizing world. The interracial
love story between Julie and Abdu thus takes up Gordimer's theme of Self and Other (on both a cultural and individual
level) and broadens its scope from the racial opposition of 'Black and White' to the cultural opposition of 'East and
West.' The Pickup, like several other fictional stories from 2001, has gained in topicality as a result of this thematic
choice. The events of September 11 have put the relationship between western Christian and eastern Arabic-Islamic
cultures on the agenda of political debates and TV talk shows all over the 'global village' just days after the book's
publication.

SOCIAL CONTEXT

In the novel, Gordimer displays a world in which individuals’ identity is beyond their culture of origin and the borders of
their homelands. The narrative presents a new way of looking at old questions of identity and origin. Through the love
between Julie Summer, a daughter of a prominent white citizen and Abdu also called Ibrahim, an illegal Arabic
immigrant earning his bread as a car technician, we notice a relationship only favored by the subliminal power of
literature. The class difference and mutual incomprehension between Ibrahim and Julie arouse curiosity in each other.

A cross-cultural marriage like that of Abdu and Julie is a factor creating in-between or third space identities and
cultural diversity in the current era of globalization. As such, the concern is to show how the notion of identity has to
be rethought. That is to say, how from a fix or authentic identity we are invited towards a flexible identity in this era of
globalization
AMINATTA FORNA

Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain and spent periods of her childhood in
Iran, Thailand and Zambia. Daughter of Mohammed (a physician and politician) and Maureen Forna; married Simon
Wescott (a furniture designer).

Forna studied Law at University College London and was a Harkness Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley

Birthday: November 1964

CAREER

Writer British Broadcasting Corporation(BBC), Televison Journalist(1989-1999), Director of televison documentaries,

including Africa Unmasked, 2002, Founder of an educational trust and owner of a cashew plantation in Sierra Leone,
Professor (subjects; African Literature, Transnational Literature, and Creative Writing)

AWARDS

Harkness Fellowship, University of California at Berkeley(1996), Twenty-first Century Trust Scholarship(1998), Book of
the week

Literary Piece

The Hired Man(2013)

This novel is about an english woman and her two chidren who renovate a farm house in croatia with the help of local
handy man, Duro and the revealing of the recent history of the area.

Mother of all myths(1998)

Mother of All Myths documents the present backlash, examining responses in the media, the courts, the government,
in medicine and through 'pop' psychology, which reasserts an old-fashioned, conservative and narrow view of what a
mother should be and do.

The Memory of Love (2010)

Aminatta Forna used English language in her novel. It was originally published in April 5, 2010. The novel was short-
listed for both the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011, the IMPAC Award 2012 and the Warwick Prize 2011.

SUMMARY

The novel opens in the hospital room of a dying retired history professor, Elias Cole, who, in his own voice,
unburdens his memories on his psychiatrist, Dr. Adrian Lockheart. Revisiting the late 1960s when he was a young
academic, Elias foregrounds the pivotal moment that cements his future. One evening in January 1969, he meets
Saffia Kamara, the wife of his colleague, Julian, and is transfixed by her beauty. From that day forward, he is
obsessed with her. He ingratiates himself into the Kamaras’ social life, eventually securing invitations to their house
where he meets Julian’s friends, Ade and Kekura.

These are politically tumultuous times as the country’s nascent post-colonial government teeters between coups.
Julian, Ade, and Kekura are arrested on suspicion of anti-government activities. Elias is jailed as well due to his
association with them, but in exchange for his release, he surrenders his diaries, which contain accounts of their
conversations. Julian dies in prison, and Elias marries Saffia, though she does not love him. They have a daughter,
but Saffia remains indifferent towards Elias. He retreats into an affair with a former girlfriend.

Aside from the bedridden Elias, Adrian has few patients. Recently arrived from London, where he has left a wife and
daughter, Adrian aspires to mend the war-fractured psyches of the country’s people. But he finds his “talking cure,”
or Western psychology’s preoccupation with verbalizing mental anguish, falls flat with these Africans. They don’t
want to talk about their unbearable experiences; they want medication. When the director of the city’s mental
hospital tells him that ninety-nine percent of the country’s population suffers from PTSD, Adrian starts to see the
folly in thinking he could return his patients to a “normal” state of mind. Normal, he learns, is relative.

By any definition, Agnes, another occasional hospital patient, is not normal. She checks herself in and out of the
hospital, staying only long enough for Adrian to suspect a case of dissociative fugue, a rare post-traumatic disorder
that presents with recurring wanderings from home and confusion about one’s identity. Adrian develops a rather
mercenary interest in Agnes, anticipating a name-making publication if he can treat her and report his findings.
Before he can make any headway, however, Agnes leaves the hospital again.

Meanwhile, Adrian becomes friends with a young orthopedic surgeon Kai Mansaray. Haunted by his own
unspeakable memories, which cause nightmares and insomnia, Kai throws himself into his work mending machete-
severed limbs to repress his own demons. After Adrian’s ill-fated encounter with Agnes’s family while on an
excursion with Kai and his nephew, Kai discourages Adrian from meddling in Agnes’s situation.

Two people from Kai’s university years in the early 1990s resurface in his life. One, his friend and fellow medical
student Tejani, returns in the form of letters from the U.S. urging Kai to join him there. The other is Nenebah, a
woman he loved intensely, but political upheavals separated them. Her father, complicit with the oppressive
government, tricked her into identifying fellow student anti-regime activists, who were then expelled or jailed. When
Nenebah discovered her father’s deception, she cut ties with him, left school, and became a musician. But now she
reappears in Kai’s life with a new name, Mamakay, and a new lover, Adrian. Kai doesn’t reveal to Adrian his past
with Mamakay.

It becomes clear that Elias’s narratives of his past are not therapeutic exercises in closure but attempts to
manipulate the facts about his shameful history. Elias, it turns out, is the father that betrayed Mamakay (Nenebah);
she tells Adrian, “He’s using you to write his own version of history.” The true – or truer – version is that Elias
listened as Julian died of an asthma attack in the jail cell next to him and didn’t speak up. He cooperated with a
repressive regime by naming campus activists. He was with his girlfriend when his wife, Saffia, died in a car crash.
Mamakay, whose mother expressed her mistrust of Elias before she died, cannot reconcile with her father.

Mamakay becomes pregnant with Adrian’s child and dies giving birth. Kai confesses his love for Mamakay, finally
agreeing to try the “talking cure” advocated by Adrian to relieve his psychological suffering. Using a technique of
psychoanalysis, Adrian accesses Kai’s tormenting memory of being abducted when rebels invaded the hospital,
watching them rape and kill a nurse, being raped himself and then thrown from a bridge and left for dead. That Kai
crosses this bridge at the end of the novel and decides not to leave for the U.S., suggests he has healed to some
degree.

Adrian returns to London and his failed marriage, leaving his newborn daughter with Kai. Kai visits Agnes’s village
and pieces together her story from whispering neighbors: Agnes’s daughter unwittingly married the rebel who killed
Agnes’s husband. Intolerable as it is, Agnes cannot tell her daughter.

Not telling, or silence, as a survival strategy for those who have endured trauma is a significant theme in Forna’s
novel. It does admit exceptions, such as Kai’s case, when traditional Western narrative therapy succeeds. But those
exceptions don’t mitigate the novel’s skepticism toward foreign aid efforts. On her website dedicated to fostering
local initiatives in her hometown Rogbonko, Forna writes, “We think Africa has all the experts it needs – they’re the
people who live there.”

WRITER’S context

Aminatta Forna is the award-winning author of the four novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and
Ancestor Stones, and the critically acclaimed memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water.

Her most recent, The Window Seat, is a stunning new collection of essays crossings both literal and philosophical, our
relationship with the natural world, and the stories that we tell ourselves.

Her fiction has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award and the PEN Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, as
has been short-listed for the Neustadt Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the IMPAC Award, the Warwick Prize and
nominated for the European Prize for Fiction.

Her memoir was serialized on BBC Radio and in The Sunday Times newspaper. Forna is currently a Lannan Visiting Chair
at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Aminatta is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, has won the Commonwealth Writers’
Prize Best Book Award 2011, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award the Liberaturpreis in Germany and the Aidoo-Snyder Book
Prize.

She has been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize for Literature, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the IMPAC Award and the
Warwick Prize. Aminatta Forna was made OBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours 2017.

She is Director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University and Professor of Creative
Writing at Bath Spa University She has written stories for BBC radio and written and presented television documentaries
including “The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu” (BBC Television, 2009) and “Girl Rising” (CNN, 2013).
She is currently a judge for the 2019 Giller Prize. Happiness is Aminatta is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and
a member of the Folio Academy. She has acted as judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Bailey Prize for Women’s
Fiction, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Caine Prize and the International Man Booker Prize.

In 2003 Aminatta established the Rogbonko Project to build a school in a village in Sierra Leone. The charity has also run
a number of projects in the spheres of adult education, sanitation and maternal health.

Aminatta’s books have been translated into twenty two languages. Her essays have appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The
Guardian, LitHub, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Observer and Vogue.

Aminatta Forna is one of our most important literary voices, and her novels have won the Windham Campbell Prize in
Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. Now, she returns with The Window Seat, an elegantly
rendered, thought-provoking collection of new and previously published essays. In this wideranging collection, Forna
writes intimately about displacement, trauma and memory, love, and how we coexist and encroach on the non-human
world.

SOCIAL CONTEXT

The novel is about how the survivors grapples of the widespread wartime atrocities cope with their collective trauma in
the 60s. Social Context The people who have survive the civil war cope with silence and not telling anyone about their
traumas. The people wanted medication, they don't want to talk about their unbearable experience.

TEXT CONTEXT

In contemporary Sierra Leone, a devastating civil war has left an entire populace with secrets to keep. In the capital
hospital, a gifted young surgeon is plagued by demons that are beginning to threaten his livelihood. Elsewhere in the
hospital lies a dying man who was young during the country’s turbulent postcolonial years and has stories to tell that are
far from heroic. A work of breathtaking writing and rare wisdom, The Memory of Love seamlessly weaves together two
generations of African life to create a story of loss, absolution, and the indelible effects of the past—and, in the end, the
very nature of love.