This coming Wednesday we will have more news on the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, but in the meantime, Marie Heese and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani are this year's queens of the shortlists - below are the full Africa regional shortlists if you've missed them over the past month (other regions available here)

The shortlisted writers for Africa's Best Book are:

Trespass by Dawn Garisch (South Africa)

The Double Crown by Marié Heese (South Africa)

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria)

Eyo by Abidemi Sanusi (Nigeria)

Tsamma Season by Rosemund Handler (South Africa)

Refuge by Andrew Brown (South Africa)

Kings of the Water by Mark Behr (South Africa)

The shortlisted writers for Africa's Best First Book are:

I Do Not Come to You by Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani (Nigeria)

The Shape of Him by Gill Schierhout (South Africa)

The Shadow of a Smile by Kachi Ozumba (Nigeria)

Come Sunday by Isla Morley (South Africa)

Sleepers Wake by Alistair Morgan (South Africa)

Jelly Dog Days by Erica Emdon (South Africa)

Harmattan Rain by Ayesha Harunna Attah (Ghana)

Now, anyone who works with books from across the continent will tell you that South Africa and Nigeria dominate the African publishing scene (followed by Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania), but I was struck by the excessive proliferation of South African and Nigerian titles on the list this year (2009 was not much better, to be honest)! Luckily, I was visiting South Africa last month as the shortlists were announced and in the hopes of reading a few before the final announcement, I picked up one or two of the shortlisted titles - more on those later.

Who doesn't love a good reading list? It is that time of year again and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize shortlist has been announced. As I've previously mentioned, I like the eccentric democracy of the IMPAC/Dublin. With the Commonwealth Writers' Prize I enjoy the genuine focus on books published regionally, and often overlooked in western countries. The 2008 Africa region candidates are:

Best Book, Africa Region
Barbara Adair (South Africa) End Jacana Media
"...the Johannesburg and Maputo of the 1980’s; where wars of varying violences erupt and conjure the edgy, war-torn world of the film Casablanca."

Ifeoma Chinwuba (Nigeria) Waiting for Maria Spectrum Books
"The cost of maintaining death row inmates has skyrocketed, resulting in high costs for the Department of Prisons. Government is anxious to implement the death sentences passed in the last few years but stalled by the absence of an executioner..."

Finuala Dowling (South Africa) Flyleaf Penguin Books SA
"Violet Birkin is a teacher, and since she’s paid to teach by the hour, she imagines she’ll have to teach forever. But her life is changing: she’s shedding her hair and her husband..."

Karen King-Aribisala (Nigeria) The Hangman's Game Peepal Tree Press
"A young Guyanese woman sets out to write an historical novel based on the 1823 Demerara Slave Rebellion and the fate of an English missionary who is condemned to hang for his alleged part in the uprising, but who dies in prison before his execution. She has wanted to document historical fact through fiction, but the characters she invents make an altogether messier intrusion into her life with their conflicting interests and ambivalent motivations."

Susan Mann (South Africa ) Quarter Tones Harvill Secker
"When Ana returns to the ramshackle cottage of her youth in the seaside village of Noordhoek, near Cape Town, she does so with the intention of sorting out her father’s affairs. It soon becomes clear that more is at stake. After a decade in London, where she has failed to find work as a musician, her return to South Africa puts further distance into an already strained marriage, not only because she is out of reach, but because Michael, her husband, has lost faith in the country."

Zakes Mda (South Africa) Cion Penguin Books SA
"Toloki, the Professional Mourner who is the main character in Zakes Mda’s earlier novel Ways of Dying, returns in Cion, but is now travelling ‘to seek other ways of mourning’..."

Best First Book, Africa Region
Sade Adeniran (Nigeria ) Imagine This SW Books
"A compelling story about the human spirit and resilience against the odds. Imagine This is the journal of Lola Ogunwole which she starts at the age of nine; it charts her survival from childhood to adulthood..."

Ceridwen Dovey (South Africa) Blood Kin Penguin Books SA
"A chef, a portraitist and a barber are taken hostage in a bloody coup to overthrow their boss, the President..."

Dayo Forster (Gambia) Reading the Ceiling Simon and Schuster
"Three men. Three paths. One will send Ayodele to Europe, to University and to a very different life -- but it will be a voyage strewn with heartache. Another will send her around the globe on an epic journey, transforming her beyond recognition but at the cost of an almost unbearable loss. And another will see her remain in Africa, a wife and mother caught in a polygamous marriage. Each will change her irrevocably: but which will she choose?"

Ken Kamoche (Kenya) A Fragile Hope Salt Publishing
"These are poignant stories of love, betrayal, dreams and tribulation, corruption and redemption. Whether we’re reading about the Hong Kong girl who reconciles with her estranged father following a chance encounter with an African musician, or the hangman whose life is torn apart by demons from the past, these stories take the reader on a journey that is as emotional as it is culturally rich."

Sumayya Lee (South Africa) The Story of Maha Kwela Books
"The child of a forbidden marriage, Maha grows up happily with her parents in Cape Town. But her world changes forever when her parents are killed at a political rally, and at the age of eight, Maha is reclaimed by her loving but staid Indian grandparents and taken to live in Durban."

Carel van der Merwe (South Africa) No Man's Land Umuzi
"36-year-old Paul du Toit, a covert army operative in the twilight years of white-ruled South Africa, believes he has buried his violent past, until events force him to apply for amnesty from the TRC for the deaths of two anti-apartheid activists."

As always, descriptions taken from pubishers' websites. If you can't find these at your local independent bookshop, remember the Africa Book Centre, which ships worldwide.

Zakes Mda, of course, is the big heavy hitter who might be expected to win. But there are lots of fresh voices in this list, so the field is wide open at present. Back to my groaning TBR pile, and perhaps I will hazard a guess before the winners are announced in March.

The full shortlists, including other regions of the world, are available here.

I've noticed a strange thing - when I add a book to my "currently reading" list (over there on the right) I stop reading it. Some titles have sat there for months. So perhaps I should rename it the "living in anticipation" list. At the moment my reading is largely driven by what I have out from the library, which means I am distinctly side-tracked from the bigger purpose of reading at a pace towards the book I'm writing. I need to crank things up a notch or two for this "working reading" as I call it (as opposed to reading for pleasure). Happily, they frequently overlap.

Look at this fantastic opening paragraph to HARVEST OF THORNS by Zimbabwean Shimmer Chinodya:

The day he came back, and she walked in obliviously from the shower-room with soapsuds on her hands and found him sitting in his big brown boots on the sofa, she cried so much the neighbours rushed in thinking she had received news of death; after they had gone and she could talk she looked at the ropes of dried meat hung on a strip of newspaper and fished into her long skirts to send Peter to the butcher.

Published in 1989, part of the novel first saw the light of day as Chinodya's MA thesis at the University of Iowa in the mid 80s. In 1990 it won him the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Africa Region. It has a wonderful quality to it, and I am enjoying it thoroughly as (unofficial) current reading!

I received a lovely parcel of books this week from the Africa Book Centre containing the books I was missing off the 2007 shortlist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (I picked all the others up while in South Africa, and am currently working my way through them).

To whet your appetite, here are the cover blurbs. For THE SHADOW FOLLOWS by David Medalie a description which, unintentionally or not, sounds like a soap opera!

It is August on the highveld: a time of dust, wind and melancholy. Distracted only for a moment by the unremarkable person in the cinema noisily excavating his popcorn, Deanna's real concern is that she might be HIV positive, having stabbed herself in the thumb after giving an injection to a patient. She hasn't heard from her brother in days and doesn't seem to have a clue that he's busy fighting off a silent obsession with her estranged husband, Richard. Richard, meanwhile, has much on his mind too. He has enlisted the services of a company called Relative Success in an attempt to track down his biological mother who disappeared shortly after giving birth to him in the early evening of Boxing Day in 1964...

For ALL WE HAVE LEFT UNSAID by Maxine Case (which, incidentally, has won Best First Book, Africa Region in the meantime):

Danika believes she can cope with anything. Now, as she keeps vigil at her mother's hospital bed, watching her life slip away, she feels compelled to answer the questions that linger from her childhood in the eighties. What was the state of emergency about? Why did her father leave, and what happened the night no one ever talks about?
Only now, with her mother beyond hearing, can Danika break the silence of those difficult years. Now she can speak the words that were always left unsaid.

It is really annoying that there was only about a month between announcing the shortlisted candidates and declaring the winners. Despite my best efforts there was no possibility of finishing all the titles in such a short interval, unless I'd had the luxury of dedicating all my time to completing just these books. Perhaps they don't think the general public actually reads?! Ah well, I'll press on and keep you informed as I go.

While those of us based in the UK may attend the Hay Festival in May (I'm planning to attend, if anyone else is going and would like to meet up for a cuppa), the other major literary shindig at the same time is the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica. The Commonwealth Writers' Prize winners will be announced at the latter. Shortlisted candidates were announced last week (full list here). The Africa region nominees are almost all South African, so I stocked up last week at the airport. They are:

Africa Region Best Book

Native Commissioner by Shaun Johnson (South Africa), Penguin Books
What Kind of Child by Ken Barris (South Africa), Kwela Books
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), Harper Collins
The Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Kenya), Random House UK
Playing in the Light by Zoe Wicomb (South Africa), Umuzi
Song of the Atman by Ronnie Govender (South Africa), Jacana

Africa Region Best First Book

All We Have Left Unsaid by Maxine Case (South Africa), Kwela Books
Ice in the Lungs by Gerald Kraak (South Africa), Jacana
A Life Elsewhere by Segun Afolabi (Nigeria), Jonathan Cape
Room 207 by Kgebeti Moele (South Africa), Kwela Books
The Beggar's Sign Writers by Louis Greenberg (South Africa), Umuzi
The Shadow Follows by David Medalie (South Africa), Picador Africa

If you're finding it difficult to track them down, as always I recommend the Africa Book Centre and they do ship internationally. My to be read pile (teetering at the best of times) is about to keel over.