'amaBooks and Worldreader

'amaBooks are working with Worldreader to help make good creative writing available to young people across Africa and elsewhere.

As a first step, stories from Silent Cry: Echoes of Young Zimbabwe Voices, and selected stories from other 'amaBooks collections, are available to read free of charge on mobile feature phones using the Worldreader App.

With the first-ever book application available for feature phones, Worldreader is turning on its head the notion that reading e-books requires an e-reader, tablet or smart phone.

In order to achieve this ground-breaking feat, Worldreader has partnered with biNu, an App developer based in Sydney. biNu’s patented technology effectively turns a feature phone into a smart phone—enabling millions of people in the world’s poorest places access to Facebook, Twitter, Local News, Google—and, now, the Worldreader Book App, and so to stories from Zimbabwean writers.

To give you an idea of the enormous scope and potential: feature phones are the largest and fastest growing segment of the global mobile market, with over 60% of the global mobile market share of almost 5 billion mobile subscribers. As of April 27 2012, the Worldreader App is on 3.9 million mobile phones, mostly in India and Africa, and Worldreader hope to reach 10 million by the end of 2012.

As well as stories from the collection being available through feature phones, Silent Cry: Echoes of Young Zimbabwe Voices will be available on e-readers as part of Worldreader programmes.

Silent Cry: Echoes of Young Zimbabwe Voices is a book of twenty-eight stories and fourteen poems, written by thirty-three young people from Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo. The pieces cover many issues, including family, gender, relationships, race, alienation, disability, AIDS, border jumping and the struggle to survive in Zimbabwe.

Silent Cry: Echoes of Young Zimbabwe Voices is available on a print-on-demand basis or as an ebook through the African Books Collective http://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/silent-cry

More information about the Worldreader programme can be found at http://www.worldreader.org

Photographs of children in school benefitting from the presence of e-readers are reproduced courtesy of Worldreader

Narrating the Zimbabwean nation: a conversation with John Eppel

John Eppel interviewed in Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Africa

Volume 17. Issue 1, 2012

Abstract

In this interview, John Eppel, a veteran of Zimbabwean writing, confirms his reputation as an “angry jester”, determined to expose what he describes as “humbug”, wherever he sees it. With his satires, Eppel has stirred the national literature with subversive laughter, ridiculing both Rhodesian society under Ian Smith and post-independence society under Robert Mugabe. With his poetry, he innovatively marries European forms with southern African content. During the crisis of the 2000s he refused exile and has been consistently critical of political and social corruption and injustice from within Zimbabwe's borders.

The full interview with Drew Shaw of the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo can be found at:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/18125441.2012.706082

Bryony Rheam interviewed on BBC Focus on Africa

Bola Mosuro interviewed Bryony Rheam about her novel This September Sun on the October 2 edition of Focus on Africa on the BBC World Service.
Please click on the link below to access the podcast of that edition of Focus on Africa.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/africa