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Adewale Maja-Pearce

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including A Peculiar Tragedy (New Gong, 2010) and Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays (New Gong, 2005). He is also the author of the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human-rights violations in Nigeria and the editor of The Heinemann Book of African Poetry in English (William Heinemann Ltd, 1986) and The New Gong Book of Nigerian Short Stories (New Gong, 1987), among other anthologies.

Author

And After Many Days. By Jowhor Ile. Tim Duggan Books, 2016. 256p. HB, $25.00.

The Successors

Fall 2016 | Criticism

There has been much talk lately of a renaissance in Nigerian literature. Hardly a year passes without yet another young writer winning yet another international prize. This renaissance is measured against the writers who came of age around the time of independence from British colonial rule, in 1960—notably Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize in 1986, and Chinua Achebe, whose seminal novel, Things Fall Apart, earned him the sobriquet “the father of African literature.” The successors of that generation, if that is what they are, came of age at the turn of the millennium, the country having meanwhile supped full with horrors: civil war shortly after independence, followed by decades under the military jackboot.