The Faber Academy is Coming to Geneva

Writing Other Lives with Petina Gappah and Christopher Hope :
Thursday 25 to Sunday 28 March 2010, 10-5pm

Société de Lecture, 11, Grand'Rue 1204 Geneva
Course fees: £500 / 830 CHF

Writing Other Lives: This course is about writing across languages, cultures, countries and borders, writing while living other lives.

Course director, Petina Gappah, is a multilingual Zimbabwean lawyer who has lived in Switzerland, England and Austria. Her debut collection, An Elegy for Easterly, won the 2009 Guardian First Book Prize. Teaching alongside her is the highly acclaimed and experienced writer Christopher Hope, whose prodigious output includes the award-winning Kruger’s Alp and his Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, Serenity House. As a South African who has lived in England and is currently living in France, he knows all about writing with a hyphen.

During the course, participants will address some of the following questions: How do we write in languages that we choose, or that choose us, but that are not the languages of our birth? Is writing across language a form of translation? How can we convey our world view in a language that is not originally ours? How do we convey another culture in an adopted language? How do we write in our adopted languages and still remain true to our own cultures? Is there such a thing as authenticity, and what is it? How do we write the experiences of those whose cultures and languages are not ours?

There will also be close readings of passages from renowned writers who have written across languages and cultures.

If they wish to do so, participants are encouraged to bring manuscripts for critiquing. Petina and Christopher will also offer practical help on agents and publishers.

The course will take place at the Société de Lecture, a beautiful building in the heart of the old city of Geneva. The Société de Lecture is home to over 400,000 works of literature and over the years has been frequented by well known figures from the worlds of literature, politics, art and science.

Maximum number of course places available: 15

The course includes:

• 4 days of intensive tuition
• Complimentary Moleskine® Notebook
• Daily artisan lunch
• Regular coffee breaks
• Handy course pack including local hotel recommendations
• Special discount off Faber books purchased at www.faber.co.uk

About the Tutors

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. Her short fiction and essays have been published in eight countries. She lives with her son Kush in Geneva, where she works as counsel in an international organisation that provides legal aid on international trade law to developing countries. She is currently completing The Book of Memory, her first novel.

Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg in 1944. He is the author of nine novels, including Kruger’s Alp, which won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, Serenity House, which was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize, and My Mother’s Lovers, published by Atlantic Books in 2006 to great acclaim. He is also a poet and playwright and author of the celebrated memoir White Boy Running (1988). The Garden of Bad Dreams is his latest collection of short stories.

About Faber

Faber and Faber is the last of the great independent publishing houses in London. We were established in 1929 by Geoffrey Faber and our first editor was T. S. Eliot. Among our list of authors we are proud to publish five Booker Prize winners and eleven Nobel Laureates. We are particularly well-known for our unrivalled list of modern poets and playwrights, as well as for publishing writers of prize-winning fiction and general non-fiction.

To make a booking:

Contact Becky on either beckyf@faber.co.uk or +44 (0) 207 927 3908

Or Patrick on either patrickk@faber.co.uk or +44 (0) 207 927 3822

Places are strictly limited, so book soon to avoid disappointment

Thinking About John Simpson's "Head of a Negro"

I have been asked to write a short reaction to a detail from any painting of my choice from the Tate's Collection, for the art magazine TateEtc. There is so much to chose from, I love Turner, and Sickert, who is morbidly fascinating, I love the portraits of Reynolds and Gainsborough and Constable: and that's even before we get to the Tate Modern and talk about Roy Lichtenstein and Mark Rothko and Edward Hopper and Chris Ofili (who by the way, has a stunning new exhibition at the Tate). The only problem with the Tate for me is that they do not have nearly enough Dutch Masters ... Rembrandt and Vermeer, their imitators and their pupils, are my favourite artists of the pre-modern period. One of the most dazzling sensations I have experienced was being hit by the full force of The Night Watch in the Rikjsmuseum in Amsterdam. There may, I fear have been loud gasps.

Out of the wealth of the Tate, I have chosen this little known painting by the equally little known painter John Simpson. Called Head of a Negro, and painted before the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, it is one of the few remaining studies of a black man from that period. When I first saw it, I could not take away my eyes from his face ... and it is of that face that I will write about for the Tate magazine. Stay tuned.

Image copyright and souce: Tate Britain.

A World Exclusive: The first two sentences of my novel, The Book of Memory, here on this blog!

I am currently putting together some material ahead of the publication of my novel next year ... scary how things work in publishing, how you have to start planning for a book a year or so before it is published. I thought I would treat you, my dear blog readers, to a taste of my coming novel, give you a taster, a teaser as it were. So I am pleased to unveil to my dear blog readers the first two sentences of my forthcoming novel, The Book of Memory. As part of my commitment to being a Real Genuine Authentic African Writer, I have chosen to give these sentences to you in the Real Genuine Authentic African language of Shona. And if you don't understand it, well, that could well mean you are not as Real and Genuine an Authentic African as me.

And here it is:

Nyaya yawanditi ndikunyorere pasi haina kutanga nekupondwa kwaLloyd Henderson kwete, asi kuti yakatanga mumwe musi muna Kukadzi, pandaiva kamwana kemakore pfumbamwe, zuva richirova nhongonya yangu nemaronda aiva kumeso kwangu, baba namai vangu ndokunditengesera kune mumwewo mutorwa. Ndinoti zvangu ndibaba namai vangu vakadaro, as chokwadi ndechekuti vaiva mai vangu chete.

UPDATE:

Thanks for the comments below, you guys, I am very sorry indeed for those of you who do not understand Shona, but authenticity is the most important thing that an African writer has to offer ... more important than wit and humour, compassion and kindness, a strong moral vision and wisdom and humanity and all that, more important than compelling characters that you discuss for days, more important than style that makes you gasp ... no, no, none of that matters because to be an African writer is to be proud to be an African Writer and it is all About the Positive Image of Africa and so on. The authentic, positive image. So that's me from now on, Really Genuinely and Authentically and Most Positively African:) And if the meaning of my authentic positive African words is lost to you, too bad, as long as I am authentic:):):) And positive!!

A message to whoever cares to read it ... I'm with Coco

This blog, by which I mean me, is firmly behind Conan O'Brien in his fight with NBC and the comically unfunny Jay Leno. That's right world, I'm with Coco.

Thinking of Haiti ... and what stands between death and survival

Here are two little boys who have been flown out of Haiti and into France via Martinique. Many others like them lie dead under the rubble, while those that escaped face an uncertain life in a collapsed city. What has saved these little boys from the latter is the happy accident of being born to parents who hold French passports. A reminder, yet again, that for a good many people in the world, all that stands between success and failure, between dreams and achievement, between death and survival, is the nation you belong to, the passport you hold. And if you belong to the wrong nation, that is sometimes all it takes to break you. Photo: Daylife.

Of Tash and Joris and Vamba and Jonathan and the secret of my success

Do you see this dog? He was everywhere at The Hague this weekend, even in my dreams. His was the groomed, serious and a little sardonic face of the Winternachten festival. I had the most tremendous fun. I gave the poor organisers so many headaches, because things were a bit hectic at work and it was dicey whether I would make the festival at all. Thanks to Sarah, Tineke, Marte and Marianne and the rest of the Winternachten team, I made it, but missed some opening events. It was also confirmed for me that the key to the smooth functioning of a festival are volunteers ... like the wonderful Jutien van den Steen, lapsed lawyer and driver extraordinaire.

There was lots of publicity too, organised by the festival and by Mouria my terrific publishers ... I did some great interviews. And the photographs! I wore a turban! I looked serious! And a little sardonic! I will post them here as soon as I get them.

I did two gigs - the first was a discussion with Vamba Sherif, a Dutch and Liberian writer and journalist (and another lapsed lawyer). We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, especially because we had wonderful rapport with our moderator, the journalist Joris Luyendijk who was quick-witted and funny, interested and interesting. And if I may say so, extremely easy on the eye:) It was a cold evening full of warmth and laughter and injected with the right amount of sardonic seriousness. (Are you sensing a theme here?)

I enjoyed myself also because I spent a lot of time with Tash Aw, whose first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, blew me away about 4 years ago. We have the same Dutch publisher, which is one of the things that I love about publishing, how you share these connections with all sorts of amzing people. I met Tash last year at the Edinburgh festival and liked him at once. He is another lapsed lawyer. (Hmmm, now I am sensing a theme.) It was interesting to talk to him about his path to the choices he has made. We also gossiped madly, of course, and found to our great delight that we have some mutual friends.

I shared a very late panel with Tash, and with a number of other writers including one of the big guns of the festival, Jonathan Safran Foer: we did readings of passages that meant something to us. I read from The Book of Job, which put paid to my Christian beliefs when I was about 17 or so ... you should have seen my jaw drop when Jonathan said he had never heard anyone read anything as well as that passage, and he would be happy to have me read the phone book to him, hee hee hee. Maybe I should just start reading from The Bible instead of my own book?

The passage that stayed with me the most from that night was Tash's reading of the opening lines of Moby-Dick; I loved that wonderful sequence that begins: Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet .... .

Do you remember, a few posts ago, that I said this year I would read Moby-Dick? Tash is the fourth writer I respect who has told me about what Melville's epic means to him. First, though, I need to finish Anna Karenina, which I strated in The Hague, thanks to my trusty classics-packed Sony E-Eeader, which I take with me when I travel. I last read AK when I was 24, and I had forgotten what a stunning sensation it is to read it ... I will blog more when I finish it, which should be this weekend.

But back to Winternachten, by the time the festival ended, I was shattered: I had hardly slept or eaten the previous week, I had been going on adrenaline, nervous energy and a combination of wine and coffee (it works, believe me, just don't operate any heavy machinery). And thus I reveal, Reader Mine, the secret of my success; those good old drugs, legal in most countries, alcohol and caffeine.

Proost!

Winternachten Festival, Den Haag: Two talks on Saturday 16 January 2010

I was not sure that I was going to make this festival: because of an urgent matter in my other life, I have missed the opening night and a number of press events preceding my appearance at the Winternachten Festival in The Hague. I am a little low about this, I really wanted to hear Antje Krog, and my publisher Mouria and the Winternachten team had put together an incredible publicity blitz and there was other personal stuff, too. On the bright side, the main thing is that I will be in The Hague tommorrow, where I will be speaking on a panel, with the Dutch and Liberian writer Vamba Sherif, on chaos and order and their effect on writing. Do I know about the effect of chaos and order on writing? Not in the slightest, but when has that ever stopped me talking? And talk I will. I will also sign books after this event.

Later that night, I will be on a panel with Jonathan Safran Foer, Tash Aw, Ramsey Nasr, and Joke van Leeuwen, which sounds amazing. Here is the summary from the programme: Whether literature offers solace or confusion, whether it shows the way or disorders, every writer must have been moved in the course of his or her life by a passage, a line, an image or a poem which gave direction to his or her life. Was it a boys' book? A text on a tile? A column? Or rather that highly valued, often quoted passage from world literature? Writers read those passages that changed their lives for good, and reveal what happened to them when they read those lines for the first time.

I will be talking about some of the most hauntingly beautiful and painfully stark passages from the Book of Job. Why, I hear you ask, am I, a heathen and a non-believer, talking about the Book of Job as a passage that gave direction to my life? Well, Reader Mine, why don't you come and find out? For more information and tickets, see this website.

"An Elegy for Easterly" is now available in Finnish, and coming soon in Simplified Chinese

Some fantastic translation news: the Finnish edition of Easterly, pictured here, was released at the end of last year: it is yours to buy from a good Finnish bookshop near you. Johanna, my editor at Tammi, tells me it has been received very well, which I can confirm from my first enthusiastic reader's letter from Finland. I have also been featured on the website of MTV3, which, according to the English information on the website of the parent company MTV Media, is Finland's favourite television station. Thanks to everyone at Tammi for the great publicity and getting my book going - I look forward to visiting Finland in the next year. As you can see from this lovely cover, the magaziney look set by the Dutch version is sweeping Europe. Wait until you see the Swedish version:)

More translation news: I have received and accepted an offer for An Elegy for Easterly to be published in Simplified Chinese, or as they say in China: 我的书将在中国出版. At least, that's what GoogleTranslate says they say in China. It will be published by Shanghai 99, a cooperative venture that also publishes my main man, Dan Brown. Here, if you read Chinese, is the company website. So with the Dutch, Norwegian and Finnish versions published, the Swedish and French coming up in the spring, and the Italian and Japanese simmering in the foreground along with the Chinese, my book is now set to appear in 9 languages. Someone please make it 10, a nice, firm sort of round number. Any one in Spain? Hello, Portugal or Brazil? Germany? Poland? Russia? Morocco? Denmark? Are you there, South Korea?

I will be in The Hague this weekend, taking part in the Winternachten festival, my first festival of the year. I am doing mainly events in Europe this year, so if you are in The Hague, Amsterdam, London, Oxford, Belgrade, Kikinda, Paris, Stockholm, Uppsala and Gotenburg, keep reading because I am headed your way soon. Details any day now.

The books I am excited to be reading in 2010

The best thing about a new year? New books! Here are some of the books I am particularly looking forward to this year.

The Secret Wives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin. Having made her name as a poet (her first book is called So All This Time I was Sitting on an Egg hee hee hee) Lola Shoneyin will publish her first novel, which is set in a Nigerian polygamous household. She has a way with titles, that Lola, and this novel sounds like it will be fantastic. It is published by Cassava Republic in Nigeria, Serpent's Tail in the United Kingdom and William Morrow in the United States.

Solar, the new Ian McEwan is out in March from Jonathan Cape. I read a chapter of the book last month in the New Yorker, where it was published as The Use of Poetry. Take a peek here. I was impressed as always by what a great stylist McEwan is ... I have said in interviews how much I love and admire his craftsmanship, particularly the apparent ease with which his sentences flow. Even Saturday, wildly improbable as it was (I mean, come on, a thug changes his murderous mind upon hearing someone recite Arnold's Dover Beach? Really? Really? Really?) was extremely well-written.

This Bleeding City is the debut that I am most excited about, it is by Alex Preston, a former bond trader in the City of London, and is published by Faber in March. To get a taste of who Alex Preston is, hop over to his blog. Set in the world of hedge funds and against the backdrop of the current global financial crisis, This Bleeding City is, according to the pre-publication material that I have seen, the book for our times. I will be rooting for Alex because I root for all writers who come from "non-conventional" backgrounds, in his case, it gives me a kick to think of him with his job in the City, writing a literary novel. Go Alex.

I will also be rooting for Ferdinand von Schirach the German lawyer whose short story collection Verberechen published in Germany last year by Piper Verlag, was recommended to me by my Norwegian editor, a woman of impeccable taste. I managed to get the book at the end of last year, and read half the stories during the Christmas break ... I thoroughly enjoyed them, they are a clean and clinical dissection of crime and why people commit it. Despair not, if you don't read German, Verbrechen will be published in English by Chatto this year: this is one book I will definitely review as there is much to say about it.

You cannot keep those Nigerians away from ink and paper, I'm telling you. I will also be rooting for EC Osondu, whose new story collection comes out this year. I have few details about the collection, other than that it will be published by Harper around the summer, but as I like both EC and his work, I hope it does well. EC, if you are reading this, send more details, abeg!

One book I will not be reading is Dambisa Moyo's new book, How the West Was Lost. Blog readers know how much I looked forward to her Dead Aid prior to its publication. It was hugely disappointing. It was not only poorly researched, it also completely ignored Africa's history in its assessment of Africa's economic development problems. The writing was pedestrian, and the solutions advanced were, well, enough said. I could not review this book as well as the magnificent Adekeye Adebayo does here. So, no, thank you, dear Penguin, I gave you my money last year (and bought the book for three friends, no less) but this year, no.

So these are some of the new books that have caught my attention. There will be more of course as the year progresses, Encounter, Milan Kundera's new essay collection, to be published by Faber in June, looks intriguing and I have still not read Zadie Smith's essay collection, nor the new collection of Mavis Gallant's early work that was published at the end of last year, so there is much to look forward to. This year though, I will be mainly reading old work that I don't know, particularly John McGahern. Zadie Smith has persuaded me to finally read Middlemarch, while Wells Tower and Phillip Hoare have made me see that there is no excuse any longer not to have read Moby-Dick. I might also go a-Faulkenering at some point, and might also find myself being lulled back into Malgudi by RK Narayan, whom I have not read in a while, but who knows, the year, it is young, and anything, it is possible. Roll on 2010!

My seven resolutions for this brand spanking new year

I love making new year's resolutions. Always have. I love reading my old journals and cracking up over what I wanted to achieve when I was 19 and 20. In 2008, I read that the resolutions that most people stick to are those that they announce publicly, so I put mine for 2008 on this blog. I soon deleted that post, because they seemed to be a little ambitious. The major resolution then was "to get a book deal". I now wish I had not deleted it, because within 8 months of making that resolution, I achieved it. Now, I am going to post my resolutions here again, hoping that the prospect of public humiliation if I do not achieve some of these will propel me to achieve them. So here we go: the six main things I will do in 2010.

1. Hand in The Book of Memory on time. I am riding a little wave of momentum, and it would be a pity if I did not take advantage of this. Also, I am dying to start my third book, I have it in my head, I have it all planned, I have the first line, the first chapter, but I have promised not to write a word until I am done with Memory and it is killing me because my third book is A House for Mr Biswas combined with A Suitable Boy; it is a comic novel, it is a tragic novel, it is a huge sweeping family epic that I cannot wait to write.

2. Get my driver's license. I know, I know, I know. I know! I don't have a license and it is horribly shameful and I am hanging my head because every adult should have one. But here, for what it is worth, is my excuse: I had a horrendous car accident when I was learning to drive, I smashed a car into a wall, and caused a lot of damage. I was so freaked out by it that I could not face the thought of being behind the wheel ever again ... then two months later I moved to Austria, and I have lived in Europe ever since, and I do not care what anybody says, nobody needs a car in Europe. I live close enough to work and my son's school to walk there every day which also allows me to read and walk at the same time. This year, I will take a career break which may take me to one of two places where I will need a car, so I have to get my license before the summer. But you know who will miss me, when I have my license? The taxi drivers of Geneva, that's who. Oh how they will miss me.

3. Take a career break, write, travel and live somewhere else. I have been living in Geneva for 11 years. I have been working for 11 years. 11 years! The time has come for a mid-career break. So I am off from this summer, for a year. I have applied for two fellowships in the United States, I hope to get one of them, if not, I will be based in Zim. In that year away, I want to write that third book, and start the fourth, and I want to travel a bit. I am sorely tempted to do the Cape to Cairo, but that would mean dashing from place to place with no time to write. So I have sectioned out West Africa and I also hope to visit Hong Kong and Japan.

4. This is the year in which I get a story into Granta and into the New Yorker.

5. Take Kush to at least two tennis slams. The Australia Open, which is just weeks away, is not possible but that's the one I would have loved to attend. I still have a visa for Oz, but January is one of our busiest months at work. But there is Roland Garros to look forward to, and Wimbledon, and the US Open. Who knows, if I am in the US as I hope, we may do all three?

6. Take Kush to the World Cup in South Africa. We will not be able to attend any matches, but just being there will be enough.

7. Learn to dive. I have had this scuba-diving fantasy for too long, and this year is the year I turn it into reality. I could do this here in Geneva, but I am a little squeamish which means that Lake Geneva with its duck fleas (duck fleas!) is out of the question. So while Kush is soaking up the football atmosphere in Cape Town, me, I will be learning to dive, and before the end of the summer, me, I will be swimming with sharks. Woo-hay!

The gorgeous image above is from my friend Aya in Japan. Thanks Aya! 2010 is the year of the tiger in Japan, so don't just sit back pronouncing your tigritude, folks, get pouncing! Happy 2010, everyone, I hope the year will be a good one for all of us!