A Love Letter From Wales to Zimbabwe

Reproduced from https://nation.cymru/culture/a-love-letter-from-wales-to-zimbabwe/ 

by Ashley Eyvanaki

Authors Bryony Rheam, John Eppel, Mzana Mthimkhulu, and Tariro Ndoro, with interviewers Tinashe Tafirenyika and James Arnett, at Intwasa Arts Festival in the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. 

amaBooks is an independent publisher based in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. They specialise in Zimbabwean poetry, short stories, and contemporary novels, as well as a selection of local history and heritage titles. In recent years its founders, Jane Morris and Brian Jones, have relocated to Wales – Jane having been born in Ebbw Vale.

Whilst continuing to publish in Zimbabwe, they have formed a working relationship with Parthian Books, to whom they have sold the rights to several of their titles: the short story anthologies Where to Now? and Moving On, and the novels The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician by Tendai Huchu, and This September Sun by Bryony Rheam. 

Their most recent venture together is to co-publish the novel All Come to Dust, also by Bryony Rheam, a Zimbabwean author whose mother was Welsh.

Sitting down to interview the pair, I am amazed by how passionate both are about African literature. Although amaBooks primarily publishes in English, there are sixteen official languages in Zimbabwe.

In the isiNdebele language, spoken in Bulawayo and the surrounding provinces of Matabeleland, “ama” placed at the start of a word is equivalent to an “s” at the end of a word in English. They chose the name amaBooks to indicate that they publish books in English in an Ndebele cultural environment.

When I ask the couple about their journey into publishing, they laugh fondly and explain that they “Just stumbled into publishing.” Jane, also a social worker and social work trainer, was working with volunteers for Childline, when raising funds locally was discussed. A local poet offered a selection of his poems, and Jane and Brian volunteered to organise the publication.

One thousand copies were sold by the group, with all proceeds donated to Childline, and so amaBooks began. amaBooks have been steadily publishing a selection of books since 2001, with many having won awards, and rights having been sold to publishers across the world. amaBooks, and other African publishers, are part of the African Books Collective, who print and distribute many of their publications outside of Africa.

Welshman

The couple go on to talk about the deep-rooted historic link between Wales and Zimbabwe. In the nineteenth century, several missionaries from Wales, including Thomas Morgan Thomas and Bowen Rees, travelled to Zimbabwe to set up mission schools in Matabeleland. These schools have been instrumental in educating people who have gone on to become significant figures in Zimbabwean society.

As a result, the first name “Welshman” is one you hear in Matabeleland. Thomas Morgan Thomas translated and published several books into isiNdebele, and his book Eleven Years in Central Africa, published in both English and Welsh in 1873, is rumoured to have become the second best-selling book, following the Bible, in Wales during that period.

The literary connection between Wales and Matabeleland was rejuvenated following a Wales Arts International visit to Bulawayo in 2006. The links created led to Welsh writers Owen Sheers, Lloyd Robson, Ian Rowlands, and Peter Finch visiting Bulawayo, and some of their work being included in amaBooks publications. Owen, Lloyd, and Ian went on to participate in the annual Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo.

There are also challenges to publishing in Zimbabwe. Brian and Jane explained that the state of the economy remains the major difficulty, with over 90% of the adult population not in formal employment, and the wages of the majority of those in work being too low for many potential readers to actually buy a book – especially if it is not a school text. Libraries rarely acquire books from local publishers, relying instead on book donations from international donors.

Problems

The couple commented that amaBooks started at “The wrong time, just as the economy began its steep decline to the total collapse in 2008, from which it has yet to recover.” That decline led to other problems for the population, including publishers – a lack of fuel in the garages resulting in queuing for up to a week for petrol, frequent cuts in electricity supplies and, after many breakdowns, the end of telephone communication from where amaBooks were situated.

The majority of bookstores closed or concentrated solely on school textbooks. The shortage of food in the stores at one point necessitated monthly overnight trips to neighbouring Botswana to buy basic supplies.

The political environment proved to be a challenge for all in the creative industries in Zimbabwe. Although publishing has been less affected than many other arts sectors, there were occasions when the ruling party press printed comments about publishers whose work they considered did not follow the government line, such as “If you see a snake in your house playing with your child, you first kill the snake and save your child.” However, it was worse for other sectors of the creative industries.

A rehearsal of a play, written by two amaBooks writers, was interrupted by ‘security officials’, with two backstage workers taken away to a remote area and threatened at gunpoint – the performances were then cancelled! An exhibition by a visual artist, who had contributed a painting for an amaBooks book cover, was shut down at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo. The artist was then charged with undermining the authority of the President, which carried a twenty-year prison sentence, although charges were eventually dropped

Jane with authors Hosea Tokwe, Beaven Tapureta, Ignatius Mabasa, and Fungai Machirori, at Zimbabwe International Book Fair, Harare. 

Joy

It is when we begin discussing the joys of publishing in Zimbabwe, that both Jane and Brian’s faces light up. “It was the smiles on the faces of writers when their first stories or poems had been accepted for publication, and the enthusiasm of the audiences at the launches – many couldn’t afford to buy a book, but they came to hear the readings and to just enjoy the occasion. And just being a part of a vibrant creative community.”

The book launches, attracting up to three hundred people at times, became celebrations across the arts, with both local music and the visual arts featuring. The couple go on to reveal that the majority of amaBooks’ publications use the work of Zimbabwean artists as the basis of their covers.

As our interview winds down and talk turns to what we plan to do with our weekends, I ask the couple one last question: What is their most cherished memory from working in publishing? For the first time in our almost two-hour long talk, they pause. Lost in their thoughts, both agree that one of their most cherished memories is of standing on the veranda of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe after a book launch, sipping glasses of wine and watching the people mingling below.

Both believe that publishing through amaBooks has opened up a whole new world within their lives, allowing them to experience the joy and laughter of publishing pieces and meeting the talented people behind them.

The murder-mystery novel All Come to Dust by Bryony Rheam, co-published by amaBooks and Parthian Books is available from Parthian now.

Owen Sheers: an interview with contemporary literature’s renaissance man

Owen Sheers has been published several times by amaBooks - his poetry in Intwasa Poetry and in Short Writings from Bulawayo III, and a short story, 'Safari', in Long Time Coming: Short Writings from Zimbabwe. He has visited Zimbabwe on several,occasions, and The Dust Diaries, his creative non-fiction account of the life of his great uncle, the 'maverick missionary' Arthur Shearly Cripps,  is mainly set in Zimbabwe. His new novel is 'I Saw a Man'.

from The Guardian, 13 June 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/13/owen-sheers-interview-with-contemporary-literatures-renaissance-man

From a distance, Owen Sheers’s new novel appears to be missing a title; the cover looks bare but for the image of a flight of stairs, black against a backdrop of bilious yellow, and it’s not until you have the book in your hands that you make out the words lacquered over the top. Tip it to the light and “I Saw a Man” gleams into view like heat haze over tarmac. Put the book back on the shelf and it sinks back into the picture, leaving you wondering whether you saw anything at all.

The title is taken from the opening verse of Hughes Mearns’s well-known “Antigonish”, which Sheers quotes at the beginning of his novel: “Yesterday, upon the stair,” it goes, “I met a man who wasn’t there./ He wasn’t there again today/ I wish, I wish he’d go away…” It’s a queer little poem, shifting back and forth between witty epigram and soured, creepy nursery rhyme, and the cover realises it beautifully. But it’s also a neat metaphor for the provisional, ambiguous story Sheers has written.

The curtain lifts on the borders of Hampstead Heath on a torpid summer afternoon, at the moment when a man, believing his neighbours’ house to be empty, steps inside. Michael Turner has drifted to London following the sudden death of his wife; in the blank aftermath of the tragedy, he finds himself caught in an oddly accelerated friendship with the family next door. Through the details of their connected lives, interspersed with snapshots of Michael’s inching progress through the house, the novel establishes a network of cause and effect that reaches all the way around the world, from the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US, which sees a father lose his job in London, to the drone operator in a bunker in Nevada who obliterates a man feeding chickens in Pakistan. It twists and turns and plays its cards close to its chest, showing its full hand only in the final pages, when we are forced to reassess everything that has gone before.

The ambiguity that makes Sheers’s novel so compelling is there in him, too: as a writer, he’s impossible to pin down. He started life as a poet, publishing his first collection fresh out of university, but despite racking up great reviews, a clutch of prize shortlistings and a tour with Carol Ann Duffy, Sheers decided that his next move would be to up sticks for Zimbabwe to research the life of his great-great-uncle, Arthur Cripps. The book that arose from his story, The Dust Diaries, blended fact, fiction and conjecture to the extent that it’s sold as non-fiction in some countries and a novel in others; either way, it snagged him the first of many awards (Wales Book of the Year 2005) and the praise of no less an authority thanDoris Lessing. From there, he doubled back to publish a second poetry collection,Skirrid Hill, followed that up with a one-man play on the life of the poet Keith Douglas, then brought out his debut novel, Resistance – a crowd-pleasing historical epic that sold more than 50,000 copies. The book before I Saw a Manwas Pink Mist, a verse-drama on the Afghan conflict, a stage version of which will have its world premiere at the Bristol Old Vic this July. When we meet he has the first draft of a new play “still warm off the printer. Like a fresh kill” in his bag. And this is just the whistle-stop tour: other highlights include an anthology of British landscape poetry (and a TV series to accompany it), a three-day Passion play co-created with Michael Sheen and a stint as the Welsh Rugby Union’s writer in residence. Truly, he’s contemporary literature’s renaissance man.

With a CV like that, his “natural opposition to categorisation” is unsurprising, but when pressed he concedes that in the past he’s called himself “a poet who writes in other forms”. It was only with I Saw a Man that he consciously sought to change the label; here, for the first time, he “wanted, in quite a geeky way, to feel like a novelist writing a novel”. The fictional elements of The Dust Diaries had given him the taste for invention, but his first novel, which tells the counterfactual story of Wales under Nazi occupation, didn’t ultimately allow him its full licence. “Resistance was based on a piece of history that didn’t happen,” he says, “but to portray it with credibility, every room needed to be properly furnished. This time, I wanted to invent something from scratch.”

I Saw a Man arose entirely from that single striking image of a man easing open his neighbours’ back door, which dropped into Sheers’ head fully formed, “the first time that’s happened to me. Of course it led to a load of questions: who is he, why is he entering like that, where’s he at in his life?” In the end, he borrowed from his own backstory to fill in the blanks: the setting is based on a real street in Hampstead, where Sheers “rented a couple of flats at a time when, like Michael, I was pretty nomadic”, and the book, which he wrote between other projects over seven years, teases out some of the questions he was grappling with in his own life. “When I started it,” he says, “the idea of family felt very distant; I couldn’t work out how people did it.” Three times, he got to 10,000 words before beginning again, “which was a big psychological kick in the teeth; it’s much easier when a poem doesn’t work. But it did mean that by the time I found the right voice, that possibility of the domestic was much closer. My final deadline was my wedding.”

These days, Sheers is a father as well as a husband, and (like Michael and his wife in I Saw a Man) has lately left London for Wales’s Black Mountains. Although he was born in Fiji, where his parents were working for the Ministry of Overseas Development, he did the bulk of his growing up in a small village in Abergavenny, one of just 14 children at the local primary school. Wales – and specifically, that bleak, beautiful corner of it – has been lodestone and muse for him: the Black Mountains’ furthest outlier, Skirrid Hill, provides both title and unifying metaphor for his gorgeously elegiac second poetry collection, and Resistance is set in one of the area’s most remote valleys. Yet though its influence runs through his work, for the duration of his professional life he has lived elsewhere, only recently finding his way home again. Oxford and the University of East Anglia’s creative writing course came first; it took him a long time to find his feet (“There were more kids from Eton in my college than had gone to Oxbridge from my school for a decade, and there seemed to be a secret rule book that everyone else had access to”), and his affinity for his homeland was enhanced through his absence from and longing for it.

By the time he left UEA, he was “skint. So I applied for [TV production company] Planet 24’s graduate programme and ended up working onThe Big Breakfast”. I goggle; he laughs. The contrast with UEA’s rarefied environment was marked; suddenly, he found himself “in a living version of Martin Amis’s Money, inventing puns and booking novelty acts at four in the morning and researching Arthur Cripps in the afternoon. It was a very odd split life.” In the end, a rupture was forced. Arts Council Wales offered him a grant to work on The Dust Diaries, so he quit his job and moved into his parents’ caravan on the Pembrokeshire coast for a winter, where “the day’s main event was walking along the cliffs. The grand idea was that I was going to write and surf, but there weren’t any waves that winter. So I got on with writing.”

The Dust Diaries made a minor impact, but it was with Skirrid Hill that Sheers really hit his stride. As well as cementing his reputation as a writer of Wales, it sowed the seed of what would become his other essential subject. The opening poem, “Mametz Wood”, visits the scene of one of the first world war’s bloodiest battles, where “even now the earth stands sentinel, / reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened”. War – its tolls, its terrors, its physical and psychological scars – has haunted his work ever since; it wasn’t, he says, something he set out to write about, but one poet led him to another, one conflict to the next. He followed up his radio play on Douglas with a second on Alun Lewis, the Welsh poet whose centenary is this year, and approached the task from a novelist’s perspective in Resistance. Then he moved on to contemporary conflicts, publishing The Two Worlds of Charlie F, a play “based on the experiences of very recently wounded service personnel” in 2012, and Pink Mistin 2013. “Post-9/11 conflicts have run in exact parallel with my writing life,” he explains, “and you feel as though you want to reflect that, even if it’s through historical prisms. Plus, growing up where I did, I knew kids who entered the army at 15. Britain’s the only EU country that allows you to join the army as a child soldier. It’s scandalous, and I wanted to make people aware of that. I keep saying I want to stop, though. I’m quite warred out.”

He hasn’t quite managed this with I Saw a Man: war and Wales still feature, but their retreat from the foreground marks a new stage in Sheers’s career – and might explain why he gives the impression of being faintly bemused by his latest creation. “Before this, if you’d asked me which two books I’d never write, I’d have said, a book set in Hampstead and a novel about novel writing, which this turned out to be. Both tend to drive me mad. But having lived in temporary places in Hampstead surrounded by that sense of establishment, there was a tension that I found I wanted to explore. And I did end up thinking, what’s the point in writing in a form if you’re not going to interrogate it? It’s a negotiation, obviously; the book also has to be an absorbing read. The novels I really love are both. I hope,” he frowns slightly, “this is, too.”

It is. I Saw a Man is Sheers’s most mature and coherent work to date; taut as a thriller, but resonant with motifs of intimacy and distance, guilt and redemption, and the nature of stories and storytelling. The only shame is that his name doesn’t appear on the cover.

'amaBooks Writers at the Worlds Literature Festival

Three writers published by 'amaBooks, Togara Muzanenhamo, Owen Sheers and NoViolet Bulawayo, participated in the 2014 Worlds Literature Festival in June in Norwich in the United Kingdom. The five-day event, the 10th such Festival, is organised by the Writers' Centre in Norwich. This year's event featured 37 writers from around the world, including JM Coetzee, Ivan Vladislavic, Julia Franck, Xiaolu Guo, Adam Foulds and John Carey.

Togara Muzanenhamo

Togara Muzanenhamo's poetry anthology with John Eppel, Textures, is to be published by 'amaBooks later this year. Togara has had one collection, Spirit Brides, published by Carcanet in the UK, and another, Gumiguru, is due out by Carcanet later this year.

Owen Sheers

Owen Sheers' poem Drinking with Hitler, set in Zimbabwe, was published by 'amaBooks in Short Writings from Bulawayo III, and his short story Safari in Long Time Coming: Short Writings from Zimbabwe. He has visited Zimbabwe on a number of occasions, including participating in the Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo and at the launch of Bryony Rheam's novel This September Sun. Owen has won the Wales Book of the Year Award twice: firstly with The Dust Diaries, an account of his discovery of the life of his great uncle, the maverick missionary to Zimbabwe, Arthur Shearley Cripps, and secondly, this year, for his prose poem Pink Mist.

NoViolet Bulawayo

NoViolet Bulawayo has a short story Snapshots in Where to Now? Short Stories from Zimbabwe, which has recently been translated by Thabisani Ndlovu as Lokhu lalokhuya-yimpilo leyo! in Siqondephi Manje? Indatshana zaseZimbabwe. NoViolet won the 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing and her debut novel We Need New Names has won several literary awards, including the Etisalat Prize, and has been shortlisted for others, including the Man Booker Prize.

Photos courtesy of Writers Centre Norwich 

"The best thing I ever applied for... : British Council Crossing Borders Project

From: http://britishcouncilblogs.org/africa/2012/12/13/british-council-crossing-borders-project-the-best-thing-i-ever-applied-for

 Eight years after the British Council engaged creative writers from Zimbabwe and beyond on the Crossing Borders project, it seemed that the immediate impact of the creative writing programme was all there was to see. However to read this moving testimony from a participant of the programme on how it has changed her career gives a feeling of sweet success and an overpowering sense of why we commit our resources to creating opportunities in the first place.

Bryony Rheam was born in Kadoma in 1974 and lived in Bulawayo from the age of eight until she left school.She studied for a BA and an MA in English Literature and taught in Singapore for a year before returning to teach in Zimbabwe. She won the Zimbabwean best first novel award and gives an account of her experience in writing the award winning novel, This September Sun:

 

“The process of writing is never an easy one.  Time and again I read about writers who confess to disliking everything about it: the need to be disciplined, the hours sat in front of a keyboard (even when the ideas are flowing) and the drudge of writing and rewriting paragraphs, scenes and scenarios.  Having the ideas is the easy part.  More than once I have wished for someone to invent some sort of gadget that would allow me to plug my brain into a computer and for the story to download itself.

Unfortunately, as this gadget is still to be invented, I have had to rely on my own reserves of determination and discipline.  There is a popular idea of the writer having a muse, and when the muse is with them, they have to write.  Associated with this, is a feeling that writers are somehow special people – gifted, at least – who need to keep their own hours and express themselves as creatively as possible.

Whilst there may be an element of truth in this supposition, I’m afraid the truth is a lot less romantic in reality.  Writing is a job.  It’s a job that brings the writer an income, however small, and it’s a job that needs to be treated as such.  Of course, not everyone is a writer and not everyone who wants to be a writer can write, but those who can should not delude themselves into thinking that it doesn’t require hard work, constant attention and, until you finally have something published, frequent times of self-questioning.  Is this good?  Is this acceptable?  Will anyone enjoy it?

It took me about ten years to complete This September Sun.  That’s not to say that I was writing every day, or even every month!  I wrote in spurts, carried away at times by a determination to at least get the story down, and at other times hampered by periods of self-doubt and, dare I admit it, laziness.  When I look back, I can see that the times I worked the hardest were the times when I had had some encouragement from someone who read the odd chapter or so, or when I had a deadline to meet.

The best thing I ever did was apply to go on a British Council run writing course, Crossing Borders.  I was lucky in being accepted as it was the last year that the course was being offered.  It was wonderful.  For someone like me who works well to deadlines, it made me work hard at completing unfinished chapters and linking various ideas.  Only a small part of what I had written was sent to my mentor in the UK, but I had to do a lot of work to get to the point of choosing which excerpts to send.

I’m often asked by aspiring writers to read their work and it is a task I try to avoid if possible, not just because it feels like extra work to read through, but because I often find that the kind of people who ask me to read their work are looking for a specific type of response from me.  They want to be told that it’s good, they want me to be overwhelmed with awe at the quality of their writing and tell them to get it published right away.  I know this because I’ve been there myself and I know the awful cringing feeling of embarrassment they feel when told their writing ‘still needs some work’.  So it was also hard for me to send off chunks of my writing to someone in the UK who knew little of Zimbabwe and of the events of the past 50-60 years.  I had to make a conscious effort to send off the parts that I felt genuinely needed comment and assistance, rather than pieces I knew were good.  Like every writer, my work is very personal and I don’t take criticism well, but it actually wasn’t like that.

It was uplifting to find that some of the parts I saw as problematic were actually fine and interesting to see someone else’s point of view on pieces that hadn’t occurred to me needed reworking.  The best thing about the course was that I didn’t have to take on board all or any of the suggestions.  Ultimately, it gave me the confidence to believe that my story would be well-received and I had the impetus to get on with finishing it and stop procrastinating!

It was a great moment for me in November 2009 when I attended the launch of This September Sun at the Bulawayo Club.  The number of people who attended the launch and who bought copies of the book was quite overwhelming.  Owen Sheers, the Welsh poet and writer, who had led a writing workshop I had attended at the Intwasa Festival a couple of years previously, gave the opening speech.  At that moment I felt I had come a long way.  An idea became a story which became a book.  I’m glad I stuck at it.  My next novel, which I’m working on at the moment won’t be quite as long and I hope it won’t take me even half the time it took me to write This September Sun.  I’m on my own now – and I’m employing the muse on a more permanent contract.”

This September Sun’ was published by ‘amaBooks in Zimbabwe and by Parthian Books in the United Kingdom. It is to be published in Kenya by Longhorn. Elsewhere it is available through the African Books Collective. It is now a set book for ‘A’ level Literature in English in Zimbabwe.

Owen Sheers - the world's first international sports team writer in residence

Owen Sheers, the Welsh writer, was appointed writer-in-residence for the Welsh Rugby Union in January this year, and he now celebrates the success of the Wales Rugby team in winning the Grand Slam in the 2012 Six Nations tournament.

While he’s already written poems for the programme of every home game, he’s also gathering material to use in future.

“I now have a much clearer idea of how the material will take shape. I hope to write across the full range of forms which I’ve used in the past, including non-fiction, fiction, poetry and theatre. But it’s not all going to happen straight away. It’s very natural with this type of project to immerse yourself for a long time so that you can distill the ideas.”

Sheers says the tournament has been an “extraordinary” start to his role for many reasons, including the fact Wales have won every match.

Owen has close links with Zimbabwe, he has visited the country on several occasions and has contributed poems to the 'amaBooks collections Short Writings from Bulawayo III and Intwasa Poetry, and a short story to Long Time Coming: Short Writings from Zimbabwe. The Dust Diaries, for which he won a Wales Book of the Year Award, is an account of his journey through contemporary Zimbabwe in an attempt to better understand his distant relative Arthur Shearly Cripps' devotion to the country. Owen's first novel Resistance has recently been released as a film.

In 2009, Owen visited Zimbabwe and launched Bryony Rheam's debut novel This September Sun. This September Sun is to be published in the United Kingdom by Welsh publisher Parthian Books in May 2012.

Photograph and quote courtesy of the Western Mail.

Granta Interview with Owen Sheers

Owen Sheers has been interviewed by Granta online editor Ollie Brock about the article he wrote for Granta about his recent visit to Zimbabwe, during which he helped launch Bryony Rheam's novel This September Sun. An excerpt is below; the full interview can be seen at http://www.granta.com/An-interview-with-Owen-Sheers

"What challenges do writers face in Zimbabwe? What benefits can they bring?

A few years ago I taught a short course to promising young writers in Bulawayo. Some of the difficulties they told me about were very much connected with the mechanics of writing. No power for their computers, or light to write by. A shortage of books to read for influence and inspiration. And then there were issues of censorship too - experienced more by playwrights than novelists or poets, as far as I could tell. In some of the short story writers I met the response to this sometimes manifested itself in pieces of stunning surrealism or post-realist fiction. One playwright recently told me that what most concerned him at the moment was that although there was work for playwrights, so much of it was writing pieces for NGOs and educational theatre, that he felt the very quality of Zimbabwean theatrical writing was suffering as a result – that ‘issue’ theatre was killing a genuine dramatic tradition.

On a broader canvas, I think one of the challenges that Zimbabwean writers face is finding a wider international audience prepared to look beyond the ‘known’ stories of Zimbabwe. I’ve been very struck that over the last 10 to 15 years most of the books about Zimbabwe (mine included) were written by white Zimbabweans or European visitors. There are plenty of writers in Zimbabwe, and plenty of good ones too, but it seemed as though it was still the white writers who had access to the international publishing scene. Thankfully that is starting to change, with writers such as Petina Gappah finding wider audiences, as with some remarkable home-grown Zimbabwean publishers such as amaBooks still publishing vibrantly, determined that more Zimbabwean voices from inside Zimbabwe are heard on the world stage.

As for benefits? Who knows. I do believe that a well written piece of imaginative prose or poetry has the potential to penetrate further, and stay with a reader longer, than hundreds of factual articles. That by engaging readers’ hearts, heads and ears simultaneously, writers can bring Zimbabwe today springing off the page. I also think that it’s important for Zimbabwe to see herself reflected in fiction and poetry. When that reflection starts to fade is when a country and a people can start to seem invisible. I think Arthur Cripps understood this, changing the views of western readers by being the first to write pastoral poetry about the daily life of Shona farmers, treating them as equals in literature so that one day they might be given that status in their real lives too."

The photograph is of Owen at the launch of Bryony Rheam's This September Sun in Bulawayo.

Owen's article about his visit, The Road Trip, is online at http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Road-Trip

Owen Sheers in London

Owen Sheers will take part in an evening of discussion and readings with fellow Welsh writer Dannie Abse at The Arts Club in London on June 17th at 6.30pm.

Owen has visited Zimbabwe on several occasions, most recently in November 2009 when he helped launch Bryony Rheam's novel This September Sun. He has also been published by 'amaBooks, with a poem in Short Writings from Bulawayo III, a short story in Long Time Coming: Short Writings from Zimbabwe and five poems in Intwasa Poetry.

The Arts Club evening is a Wales in London event.

Owen Sheers at the Book Cafe in Harare

On Monday 23 November, Owen Sheers will be at the Book Cafe in Harare at 5.30pm to talk about myths and how they appear in modern writing. He will be joined in the discussion by Joseph Tirivangana, expert in Zimbabwean myths and legends. Owen will also read his poetry together with several Zimbabwean poets, including David Mungoshi, Ethel Kabwato and Batsirai Chigama. Again, entrance is free and all are welcome.

Meet Owen Sheers in Bulawayo

The British Council in Bulawayo are organising a Management Express meeting for Friday 20 November at 5.30pm at the Bulawayo Rainbow, where Owen Sheers will talk about his own work and links with Zimbabwe, and read from his books. Owen is a poet, novelist, playwright, actor and BBC TV presenter from Wales. He is best known in Zimbabwe for his semi-fictionalised account The Dust Diaries, recounting the life of his great-great uncle, Arthur Shearly Cripps, maverick missionary to Southern Rhodesia. The event will also recognise the achievements of three Bulawayo graduates of the British Council Crossing Borders creative writing project, Bryony Rheam, Christopher Mlalazi and Raisedon Baya, who have all recently had books published. All are welcome.

Launch Invite for This September Sun

A night to write home about

amaBooks and Alliance Francaise de Bulawayo invite you to

a Book Launch and a Dinner with Poetry

THURSDAY 19th NOVEMBER

5.30pm Launch of the novel This September Sun, by Bryony Rheam
Guest Speaker: Owen Sheers
Free Admission, All Welcome

followed by, for those who wish, at 7.00pm, Dinner with Poetry
With readings by Owen Sheers from Wales and John Eppel from Zimbabwe

A table d’hôte menu will be available, with choices of starter, main course and dessert.

Please book early for the dinner as numbers are limited, telephone Bulawayo Club reservations on (09) 64868. Payment for dinner to be made directly to the Club at the dinner.

This September Sun This September Sun, the first novel by Bulawayo writer Bryony Rheam, is a chronicle of the lives of two women, the romantic Evelyn and her granddaughter Ellie, from the time Evelyn arrives in the country at the end of the Second World War to the present day.

Growing up in post-Independence Zimbabwe, Ellie yearns for a life beyond the confines of small town Bulawayo, a wish that eventually comes true when she moves to the United Kingdom. However, life there is not all she dreamed it to be, but it is the murder of her grandmother that eventually brings her back home and forces her to face some hard home truths through the unravelling of long-concealed family secrets.

The book has been described as ‘a wonderful first novel’ (Caroline Gilfillan), ‘a beautifully executed story’ (Christopher Mlalazi) and an ‘absorbing debut novel’ (John Eppel).

Bryony Rheam was born in Kadoma in 1974 and lived in Bulawayo from the age of eight until she left school. She studied in the United Kingdom and then taught in Singapore before returning to teach in Zimbabwe in 2001. Bryony has had short stories published in several anthologies and she won the Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo Short Story Competition in 2006.

Owen Sheers is a poet, author, playwright, actor and BBC TV presenter from Wales. Owen is best known in Zimbabwe for the semi-fictionalised account of the life of his great-great uncle, Arthur Shearly Cripps, maverick missionary to Southern Rhodesia,The Dust Diaries. He is also a renowned award-winning poet, and his first novel Resistance has been translated into ten languages. Recently, he was the presenter of the BBC series A Poet’s Guide to Britain.

John Eppel is Bulawayo’s best known writer and poet, with four collections of poetry, six novels and two collections of short stories and poems to his name. John was awarded the Ingrid Jonker Prize for his poetry collection Spoils of War and the M-Net Prize for his novel D G G Berry’s The Great North Road.

Owen Sheers to launch Bryony Rheam's This September Sun

Welsh writer and BBC TV presenter Owen Sheers has agreed to be guest speaker at the launch of Bryony Rheam’s novel This September Sun. The launch is planned for 19 November at the Bulawayo Club, which is mentioned in the novel.

Owen was born in Fiji, but was brought up and educated in Abergavenny in South Wales and at New College, Oxford. He has written two books of poetry, The Blue Book, which won the Forward Best First Collection prize and Skirrid Hill, which won a Somerset Maugham Award. His first novel, Resistance, published by Faber in 2008, was short-listed for the Writers Guild Best Book Award and has so far been translated into nine languages. Big Rich Films have optioned Resistance for Owen and Amit Gupta to adapt and Amit to direct. Owen’s most recent publication is a novella, White Ravens, a contemporary response to the Mabinogion myth.

Owen is best known in Zimbabwe for the semi-fictionalised account of the life of his great-great uncle, Arthur Shearly Cripps, maverick missionary to Southern Rhodesia. The incredible story of Cripps' African legacy, Owen’s travels in his footsteps and the volatile history of a nation are all told in a series of layered, interwoven narratives that distort the boundaries between biography and fiction. The Dust Diaries was short-listed for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and won the Welsh Book of the Year award. Owen has had close links with Bulawayo – he has a poem published in the ’amaBooks collection Short Writings from Bulawayo III, a short story in Long Time Coming: Short Writings from Zimbabwe and five poems in Intwasa Poetry. Owen also participated in the Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo 2006, where he first encountered Bryony Rheam’s writing.

Owen recently presented the BBC television series A Poet’s Guide to Britain. He also wrote the introduction to the accompanying anthology.