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/ 18 December 2009
Barbara Kingsolver’s long-awaited new novel recalls a dangerous era for artists, writes Maya Jaggi.
Maya Jaggi detects echoes of 9/11 in a story about Chinese totalitarianism.
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/ 16 September 2008
Alaa Al Aswany, author of <i>The Yacoubian Building</i>, has a new novel,<i> Chicago</i>. He speaks to Maya Jaggi.
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/ 21 February 2008
Maya Jaggi reports from the Cairo book fair on the struggle for freedom of expression.
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/ 15 February 2008
Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has faced criminal charges and even death threats in his native Turkey, yet he refuses to be disillusioned.
Ben Okri has been described as a ‘literary visionary’ and ‘irritatingly pseudomystical’. His latest novel, <i>Starbook</i>, continues his quest to capture Africa, writes Maya Jaggi.
When Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka visited the Hay Cartagena festival in Colombia earlier this year, in a walled Spanish colonial town on the Caribbean coast, children in the streets instantly thought they recognised the black man with leonine grey hair. But they couldn’t decide whether he was Kofi Annan or Don King.
It took years for Femi Kuti to win over fans of his father, the Afrobeat legend Fela, writes Maya Jaggi.
Chinua Achebe is revered across continents as a founder of the modern African novel in English, reports Maya Jaggi in London.
As Athenians sweated to finish the Olympic stadiums, an Orthodox priest on the island of Paros, about three hours away, was intoning over a modest dwelling that may yet crown Greece’s cultural Olympiad. He was inaugurating the country’s first House of Literature.
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/ 12 December 2003
The first black woman to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison’s new novel, <i>Love</i>, explores the changes wrought by the American civil-rights movement and continues her engagement with love and history. Maya Jaggi reports.
A cultural icon for black artists since the 1970s, Linton Kwesi Johnson is known as a performer and recording artist as much as a writer, for poetry that blends the bass and rhythm of reggae music with his deep spoken voice. "It’s words that I’m about," he says.
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/ 14 September 2001
Review</b>: <i>The Pickup</i> by Nadine Gordimer (David Philip).
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/ 26 January 2001
Maya Jaggi meets Noam Chomsky, the founding father of linguistic philosophy and tireless scourge of American imperialism.