Lola Shoneyin, the director of the annual Aké Arts and Book Festival said it was through the festival she first encountered Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels.
In an exclusive chat with Daily Trust, she said: “In 2013, while shopping for books for the festival bookstore, I requested an ‘African Interest’ list from publishers around the globe. On the list from Bloomsbury, London, the name ‘Abdulrazak Gurnah’ caught my attention and I immediately ordered several copies of ‘By the Sea and Paradise’.”
Shoneyin, who created the festival, said curating orders for the bookstore demands that she puts herself in the shoes of potential buyers. “I was expecting a number of young writers from northern Nigeria and I wanted them to find novels authored by Muslim writers on our shelves, books that would lend validity to their stories which were at times very different from mine,” she said.
“Fast-forward to 2021, and the task of choosing a headliner for Aké Arts and Book Festival is at hand. At Aké Festival, one of our goals is to honour our literary forebears,” Shoneyin told Daily Trust. “Their presence at the festival is an important reminder that, no matter how significant our voices become, we are reaping the fruits of literary agitation that was planted and watered at a time when the African literary scene looked very different, and writers of African descent had to fight to decolonise our educational system,” said.
Shoneyin’s festival has invited and hosted first and second-generation writers from the African continent, like Africa’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Wole Soyinka; Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ama Ata Aidoo, Niyi Osundare, Nuruddin Farah and Tsitsi Dangaremgba. In 2020, the festival ventured into the global diaspora and invited Maryse Conde to last year’s, which was the first online edition.
Shoneyin spoke about the process of settling on a headliner, and how it would keep any festival director up at night. “It’s not that there is a shortage of African writers to honour in this way; it’s the range of things that must be taken into consideration: the author’s age, gender, their literary output, thematic preoccupation, their country of origin, whether they have a new book that we can leverage to promote readership.”
Shoneyin added: “In my view, Abdulrazak Gurnah, who had recently published his tenth novel, ‘Afterlives’, deserved to be read more widely on the continent where most of his novels are set, and where readers will most benefit from his insights into colonial occupation and the devastation that took place when Europe had a death-hold on the African continent.”
“When my New York Times app notified me that Gurnah had won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature, I screamed with the purest joy,” Shoneyin said. “This was the writer I had been exchanging emails with for the last three months. A short beep signalled the arrival of an email from Michael Blissett, the photographer I commissioned to capture images of Gurnah on a sunny day in September. He’d sent me 70 photos to pick from. The perfect photo for the cover of Aké Review, which is published in tandem with the festival, is bright, close-up and happy. Michael’s short email read in part, ‘today’s news couldn’t be more exciting for you’. He was right.”
The first person Shoneyin called was Molara Wood, Chief Editor at Ouida Books. “I knew she was powering through the yearly editing of Aké Review, but I had to connect with her. Earlier in the year, she and I had spent several hours chewing on the three names I had proposed to headline Aké Festival in 2021. She’s the ultimate co-conspirator. Besides being a widely-read Arts blogger in the UK in the 90s, she brings a wealth of wisdom and experience to all our conversations. I knew that she, better than anyone, would understand what this win meant for us, and how it would impact African literature and the work we were doing to promote it. ‘What sort of witchery is this?’ she said. From her voice, I could tell she was vigorously shaking her head in disbelief and amazement. I got to the office about an hour later, and we fell into a knowing embrace.”
The second person Shoneyin telephoned was veteran journalist Kunle Ajibade, who is a long-time follower of Gurnah’s work, one of the reasons why Shoneyin’s bookstore always has Gurnah’s novels in stock. “If anyone has kept Abdulrazak Gurnah in my consciousness over the years, it’s Kunle [Ajibade]. When I finally got to speak to him later that night, I let him enjoy his ‘I told you so’ moment.”
Shoneyin, also the bestselling author of ‘The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives’, is hoping to invite Gurnah for the in-person 10th anniversary event next year. “No prizes for guessing the person I will invite to interview him,” she smiled knowingly.
“Like it’s done with all Aké headliners, there will be an interview with Gurnah in this year’s edition of Aké Review,” Shoneyin said, and concluded by revealing that everyone who registers to access free Aké Festival events can catch the ‘Life and Times’ event today, Saturday 30 October, when Booker Prize-shortlisted author Maaza Mengiste will host a conversation with Gurnah on his new novel, his career, and his life.
