Mabel Segun: Nigerian children’s writer, poet and broadcaster: Mabel Dorothy Okanima Segun, who passed away on 6 March 2025, at 95, was a prominent figure in Nigerian literature. Her life was an extraordinary mix of broadcasting, children’s storytelling, poetry, playwriting, and sport. She captured human experience through the eyes of the young, as seen in …
Daniel Craig’s turn as queer writer and an ‘unfilmable’ book brought to life – what you should watch, read and see this week: William S. Burroughs was a gay drug addict. A knot of contradictions, he was also deeply homophobic, sexist, racist and a gun-loving conservative, a passion that would eventually lead to him to …
Wole Soyinka at 90: writer and activist for justice: Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, the legendary African author and activist, is proof of what words and acts can achieve in the struggle for justice and human rights. Soyinka, aged 90, embodies unrelenting activism and literary excellence. The importance of Soyinka’s work lies in demonstrating the powerful role …
Five books by Maryse Condé to introduce you to the award-winning Guadeloupian writer: Guadeloupian writer Maryse Condé, who has died aged 90, left a body of work which includes many deeply nuanced and wide-ranging responses to the centuries of often violent contact between cultures and societies. Take her bestselling pair of historical novels Segu (1984) …
Five years on the road in Africa: how Lerato Mogoatlhe became a travel writer: South African journalist Lerato Mogoatlhe set off for three months in west Africa. She ended up drifting across the continent for five years. In 2019 she wrote a book about her travels, called Vagabond: Wandering Through Africa on Faith. As a …
Kole Omotoso, the Nigerian writer, scholar and actor who inspired a continent: Kole Omotoso Premium Times Bankole Ajibabi Omotoso, better known as Kole Omotoso, the Nigerian novelist, playwright, journalist, scholar and actor, died on 19 July 2023. His son Akin Omotoso, a filmmaker, announced the death of the writer on Instagram. It came at a …
Bed rotting: the social media trend the Victorians would love, especially writer Elizabeth Gaskell: Brooklyn Museum/Wikimedia Social media has created a number of crazes recently under the theme of “wellness” and the latest, it seems, is “bed rotting”. It involves retreating to bed, indulging in snacks and TV, ignoring life’s responsibilities, and only emerging again …
Cormac McCarthy: a powerful writer who beautifully wrote about apocalypse and extinction: Endings, extinctions, last things preoccupied Cormac McCarthy from the start to the recent close of his 60-year career as a writer of fiction and, occasionally, drama for stage or screen. His first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), ends with the word “dust”. His …
Ama Ata Aidoo: the pioneering writer from Ghana left behind a string of feminist classics: Ama Ata Aidoo passed away at the age of 81. Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP via Getty Images Prolific author and former Ghanaian education minister Ama Ata Aidoo passed away on 31 May 2023 at the age of 81. News of her …
Abdellah Taïa is Morocco’s first openly gay writer – his work reimagines being Muslim, queer and African: Abdellah Taïa in Tangier, Morocco, in 2010. Abdelhak Senna/AFP via Getty Images Abdellah Taïa was born in 1973 in Rabat, Morocco. He currently lives in Paris. He is the first writer from north Africa – and in fact …
Noni Jabavu was a pioneering South African writer – a new book shows how relevant she still is: Noni Jabavu at her London office, 12th September 1961. Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Noni Jabavu was the first black South African woman to publish memoirs and one of the first African women to pursue a literary career abroad. …
Kenzabur? ?e: a writer of real humanity and the real Japan: The death at 88 of Japanese writer and Nobel prize winner Kenzabur? ?e on March 3 leaves a deep wound in his readers. But also in the Japanese community, which has lost one of its most powerful voices and critics. ?e was a literary …
Colette at 150: why the scandalous 20th-century writer remains a revered literary figure in France: Colette, as British author Angela Carter pointed out in a wittily perceptive article in 1980, is perhaps the only 20th-century woman writer to be commonly referred to by her surname only. Of course that surname is her father’s – “you …
Koos Prinsloo: the cult Afrikaans writer has been translated to English – here’s a review: Randi Linford/EyeEm/Getty Images There are some writers you wish you had encountered years ago. There are some authors you only discover – for many reasons – years after their death. The Afrikaans writer Koos Prinsloo is one such, for me. …
Juby Mayet, legendary South African writer and journalist, remembered through new book: A young Juby Mayet in Vrededorp, Johannesburg. © Baileys African History Archives/Drum photographer/Courtesy Jacana Media South African writer Juby Mayet passed away in 2019 at the age of 82. She wrote her autobiography in 1997 but it has only now been published, 25 …
How to use LibreOffice Writer templates: How to use LibreOffice Writer templates Jim Hall Mon, 07/25/2022 – 03:00 Register or Login to like Register or Login to like A staple in any office software suite is the word processor. Whether your needs are small or large, from jotting down a note to writing a book, …
An artist and a writer visited the English seaside during the pandemic – this is what they found: An older couple sit outside beach-huts in Bournemouth. Louis Netter, Author provided Unfurling along the sandy border between town and beach, the English seaside is a place of contradictions – rich and poor, old and new, fun …
Iris Murdoch: what the writer and philosopher can teach us about friendship: Brian Harris / Alamy Stock Photo Making friends might come easier to some people than others, but in general, we all use the same criteria for forming relationships. We are drawn to people who share our interests, or who we simply like and …