Search results for ""Author Alex La Guma""

In his final novel, renowned author Alex La Guma explores the tensions of a South African town fraught with the desire for revenge. Out in the flat, featureless countryside, a small mining town in South Africa is refused access to water by their oppressors. Knowing that the rain is their last chance for survival, all they can do is wait... As the dry summer wears on, the white Afrikaner townspeople are unaware of the storm brewing around them as, deep in the bush, a shepherd recalls the riddle of the butcherbird. Glimpsing into precolonial days and the aftermath of the Boer War, Time of the Butcherbird is a powerful reminder of the communities that were wrecked by conflict and dispossessed of their own land. 'The greatest South African novelist of the 20th century.' The Times 'A central figure alongside Chinua Achebe [in] the making and consolidation of modern African literature.' Ngugi wa Thiong’o

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One of South Africa’s best-known writers during the apartheid era, Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the 1950s and 60s, La Guma went into exile in the United Kingdom with his wife and children in 1966, eventually serving as the ANC’s diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba. Culture and Liberation captures a different dimension of his long writing career by collecting his political journalism, literary criticism, and other short pieces published while he was in exile. This volume spans La Guma’s political and literary life in exile through accounts of his travels to Algeria, Lebanon, Vietnam, Soviet Central Asia, and elsewhere, along with his critical assessments of Paul Robeson, Nadine Gordimer, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pablo Neruda, among other writers. The first dedicated collection of La Guma’s exile writing, Culture and Liberation restores an overlooked dimension of his life and work, while opening a window on a wider world of cultural and political struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century.

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