Bakwa Books

13/12/2024

We are beyond honored that Nineteen Ways of Looking at Awono, edited by Georgina Collins, is on 's 100 Notable African Books of 2024.

Below is BrittlePaper's description of the list:

"Our 100 Notable African Books of 2024 list is here! 🥳 We’re proud to present this year’s selection of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction that made an impact on African literary culture.

Huge shoutout to the amazing authors and publishers behind these works—and a big thank you to the Brittle Paper team for pulling this off! Six years strong!

📚 This year’s list is 🔥:
• Books from 25 African countries, including underrepresented regions 🌍
• 30% are debut authors—proving new African voices are thriving!
• Stunning covers we can’t stop admiring
• Genres: speculative fiction, mystery, thrillers, memoirs, middle-grade adventures, and more."

You can read more about the list and the wonderful titles featured in it here:

https://brittlepaper.com/100-notable-african-books-of-2024/

08/11/2024

Last year Haus der Kulturen der Welt invited twelve people from different geographies, grappling with the state of the world in their work across disciplines and contexts to respond to the question: ‘What to do with the world?’ From Balbala, Bebedouro, Errington, Gordes, Hawaiʻi, Kathmandu, Kechurewe, Nogojiwanong, Paris, Port Antonio, and Tilcara they sent poems, questions, declarations and other messages, sharing their curiosities, concerns, hopes, and trepidations about the state of the world yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Below is one of the poems:

Les rêves s’achèvent à l’aurore Amour,
Et les cauchemars aussi.
Aucun tourment n’est
si terrifiant qu’il ne cède au matin
Et les nuits sont la promesse
renouvelée de nos rêves.
La beauté du monde
portée par la succession
des jours et des nuits nous survivra.
Telle est la sublime promesse
contenue dans l’acte même de vivre.
— Hemley Boum

13/10/2024

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Awono.
Edited by Georgina Collins

Inspired by 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger, this collection highlights the diversity of Englishes in existence worldwide, with each translator rendering Awono’s poem in their own form of English including Nigerian Pidgin, Jamaican Creole, Shetlandic, and “Sesotho-fied” English.

“In translation you meet the music of different languages. In Nineteen Ways of Looking at Awono the poetry meets the music and beauty. And we get to hear translators talking about their imaginations."

Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ

“This collection of English translations demands that the reader think of their own Englishes and how many they use without necessarily being aware of it."

Kadija Sesay

Available internationally via africanbookscollective here:
https://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/nineteen-ways-of-looking-at-awono

Available in Cameroon here: https://bakwabooks.com/product/nineteen-ways-of-looking-at-awono/

or via WhatsApp. Nation-wide delivery

Publisher of literary fiction, creative nonfiction, translation & curatorial essays.

11/10/2024

Looking for a weekend read? We got you👇🏿

05/10/2024

In the art and design worlds, few items are more ubiquitous than the humble tote.

02/10/2024

"Unlike Weinberger, I refuse to say what I perceive to be “good” or “bad” about each poem, instead I want to question the criteria used to form such judgements. Is a translation necessarily better because it is more closely related to the source text, more literal, the same shape, with similar sounds, rhymes in the same place? I prefer something more unexpected, innovative, imaginative even. In poetry, I see precision as an uncomfortable restraint, while others enjoy the challenge of exactness."

Georgina Collins

https://bakwabooks.com/product/nineteen-ways-of-looking-at-awono/

19/09/2024

Whilst I may no longer know precisely when and how I wrote “Le poème de Yambacongo”, I do know why I did it… It was to avoid losing my childhood, my beautiful “kingdom”, as Senghor taught us to call the morning part of our existential experience. It was to keep it fresh, in the poem’s unalterable refrigerator. In the digital whirlwind of present times, with its volatile globality, we lose so many things, and one of the most fragile and most endangered is our childhood, our roots, all that was there when we began to form an awareness that we are confoundedly at one with light and darkness, but also with the ephemeral and the enduring

Jean-Claude Awono
(translated by Georgina Collins)

https://bakwabooks.com/product/nineteen-ways-of-looking-at-awono/

18/09/2024

Opening with the memories of the dying protagonist, Days Come and Go is the exciting story of three Cameroonian women from three generations: a young Anna who, allured by Western education, finds herself in the midst of a conflict between modernity and tradition; Abi, the journalist, whose liberating idyll with a married artist plunges her tepid family life into turmoil; and Tina, Anna’s young neighbour in Douala, who falls into the clutches of Islamists. The fates of the women in this novel span––and inevitably intertwine with––the history of Cameroon, from pre-colonial and colonial times through the independence movements to the contemporary terror of Boko Haram.

https://bakwabooks.com/product/days-come-and-go/

14/09/2024

Have you caught up on our backlist? Over the next weeks we will gladly guide you through some of our exciting titles you may have missed.

Twilight of Crooks by Johnnie Macviban

Midway between neo-noir, political novel and postmodern romp, Twilight of Crooks takes liberties with history, changing names and events such that the line between history and alternative history becomes blurred.


https://bakwabooks.com/product/twilight-of-crooks/