Translations for books by Ruby Yayra Goka, Djaili Amadou Amal, Monique Ilboudo, and Scholastique Mukasonga are available, or coming soon, for your reading pleasure.
Book: So Distant from My Life
Original Title: Si loin de ma vie
Author: Monique Ilboudo
Translator: Yarri Kamara
Publisher: Tilted Axis Press
Publishing Date: October 27, 2022
Language: French to English
Where to Find it: Click here.
Monique Ilboudo
Monique Ilboudo is an author and human rights activist from Burkina Faso, the first woman to publish a novel in her country, and a major figure in Francophone African literature.
Yarri Kamara is an emerging translator from Sierra Leone and Uganda who now lives in Burkina Faso. This will be her first book-length translation into English.
So Distant from My Life
Jeanphi, a young man from the fictional West African city Ouabany, has one obsession that will determine the fate of his life – migration. He scrapes together money to take the illegal route across the Sahara, making it as far as Morocco before being repatriated. Increasingly desperate, Jeanphi meets an elegant French widower who for his part is despairing at the insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles for his charitable endeavour in Jeanphi’s country. A window opens to opportunity – but it will also bring tragedy.
Burkinabé author Monique Ilboudo’s novel offers a compelling and complex portrait of migration, one of the defining global concerns of the twenty-first century, and a sharp critique of both the NGO-isation of African countries and the currents of shame that divide communities and families. Yarri Kamara has rendered Ilboudo’s text in an idiom that conveys the sharp humour, lucid descriptions and urgency of the original.
Book: Le Impazienti
Original Title: Les impatientes
Author: Djaili Amadou Amal
Publisher: Solferino
Publishing Date: July 8, 2021
Language: French to Italian
Where to Find it: Click here.
Djaili Amadou Amal
Djaili Amadou Amal is a Cameroonian award-winning writer, and feminist activist.
Le Impazienti
Three women, three stories, three linked destinies. This polyphonic novel retraces the destiny of young Ramla, torn from her love to be married to Safira’s husband, while Hindou, her sister, is forced to marry her cousin. Patience! This is the one and only advice given to them by those around them, since it is unthinkable to go against the will of Allah. As the Fulani proverb says: “At the end of patience, there is the sky. But heaven can become hell. How will these three impatient women manage to free themselves?. Forced marriage, marital rape, consensus and polygamy: this novel by Djaïli Amadou Amal breaks taboos by denouncing the status of women in the Sahel and delivers a moving novel on the universal issue of violence against women.
Kibogo è salito in cielo by Scholastique Mukasonga
Book: Kibogo è salito in cielo
Original Title: Kibogo
Author: Scholastique Mukasonga
Translator: Giuseppe G. Allegro
Publisher: Utopia Editore
Language: French to Italian
Where to find it: Click here.
Scholastique Mukasonga
Scholastique Mukasonga is a French Rwandan author born in 1956 in the former Gikongoro province of Rwanda. In 2012, She won the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma for her book Our Lady of the Nile. In addition to being a finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Mukasonga was rewarded in 2014 with the Seligman Prize against racism and intolerance and in 2015 with the prize Société des gens de lettres.
Kibogo è salito in cielo
When the inhabitants of Rwanda come into contact with the Catholic missionary fathers, a new cult joins the ancient local beliefs. The king accepts baptism and Catholicism breaks into the lives of his subjects. The missionaries, in fact, condemn every indigenous rite, consecrating Rwanda to Jesus. Among the local legends, however, there is one very similar to the story of Christ. It is a story that bypasses time to surrender itself to the myth. The protagonist is Kibogo, the one who brought back to Earth a long-awaited rain, saving men from drought, only to be taken into heaven. Confusion between the two cults is therefore inevitable. Faced with the great drought, which does not give up and kills, why not also invoke Kibogo for the rain to return? With the irony and clarity that distinguish it, Mukasonga elects syncretism as the protagonist of an entire novel.
Book: Mesmo Quando Sua Voz Falhar
Original Title: Even When Your Voice Shakes
Author: Ruby Yayra Goka
Publisher: FTD Educação
Language: English to Portuguese
Where to get it: Forthcoming
Ruby Yayra Goka
Ruby Yayra Goka is a dentist and a writer from Ghana. Six of her young adult books have received CODE Burt Literary Awards for Young Adult Literature. She lives in Accra.
Mesmo Quando Sua Voz Falhar
A young woman speaks out against her wealthy abuser in this riveting YA novel from one of Ghana’s most celebrated children’s book authors.
When Amerley is offered a job working for one of her mother’s old school friends, she knows she has to accept. Her wages will feed her family, help her sisters stay in school, and ensure that her mother won’t have to worry about them. Amerley’s move to Accra isn’t easy, but she soon settles into her new life away from her small village―until she is raped by the son of her employer. Torn between keeping quiet to keep her job and speaking up for herself and for justice, Amerley must decide how to live her truth, and the impact of her choice will be felt through her entire community.
Through the life of an ordinary girl from a small country village, Even When Your Voice Shakes exposes the damage wrought by institutionalized misogyny and poverty and reveals how even those who are most disadvantaged are never without their own power.
