Arundhati Roy--The God of Small Things & Power Politics

Arundhati Roy is unique. She has written one novel--over ten years ago and it received the high honor of a Booker Prize and the readership of many who find it lyrical, moving, evocative of India. She is an activist--this is a page to explore about her work and words-- who has written and spoken about the environment--the cause of simple people to preserve their land; their way of life; their connection to water, earth, and place. She is political and has put her life on the line. She writes, still, and is interviewed often--such as this interview at Salon magazine 12 years ago when she had just recently published her only book of fiction, The God of Small Things. We are reading from Power Politics and the literature class is reading her novel. She said in a recent interview that she is writing/working on another novel.

Helene Cooper--her memoir & an editorial

Helene Cooper grew up in Liberia and came to the US as a refugee from the civil war that started there in 1980. She has stayed in the US although she has travelled back to Africa and to many other places in her work as a journalist. She is currrently the White House Correspondent for The New York Times and gets to ask President Obama questions--he called on her at his first Press Conference of his Administration.
Here is an opinion/editorial that she wrote when she went back to African in 2006. The memoir, The House on Sugar Beach which she published in 2008 is about the years from 1973-2003. Here is a link to two videos of her being interviewed about this book by Steve Clemons. In this article she gives you more background about herself and this book.

TsiTsi Dangarembga is an author from Zimbabwe who wrote the classic of African literature that we are reading, Nervous Conditions. She is now a filmmaker who studied in Germany--made a difficult film about AIDS orphans called Everyone's Child. She spoke at the Pen Global Writers conference and has written other articles and a sequel--The Book of Not-a Novel-- to Nervous Conditions since 2000.