Böcker av Syl Cheney-Coker

Winner of the 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Africa Region). Syl Cheney-Coker's acclaimed debut novel, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar traces the history of a nation's rise and fall, as prophesied by an ancient sorcerer.A military general sits in one of Malagueta's prison cells, awaiting his execution. He has just failed in overthrowing the government. In the same land, over two centuries ago, the wife of a formerly enslaved man takes her first steps towards freedom. From the creation of Malagueta to its devastating fall - Alusine Dunbar, the wizened old diviner, has prophesied it all. And what he sees, he calls a tragedy.One of Sierra Leone's most renowned novelists and poets, Sly Cheney-Coker creates a world teeming with magical realism as he draws the journey from precolonial Africa to its shaky independence.

Stone Child is about the nameless gemstone child that became a great in the recent history of Sierra Leone, the poet's country. With compassion and moral deliberation, the poems in the first section of this new collection resound with the pain and love that the poet felt as he reflected on the tumultuous politics and tragic destiny of his beautiful land. Other poems are in homage to people and places around the world that have deeply touched the poet. Syl Cheney-Coker is a poet and novelist. His novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar won best book in the Africa region of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He has also won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize; and his poetry has been translated into, Chinese, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The reincarnation of a legendary nineteenth-century Caribbean emperor as a contemporary African leader is at the heart of this novel. Sacred River deals with the extraordinary lives, hopes, powerful myths, stories, and tragedies of the people of a modern West African nation. It is also the compelling love story of an idealistic philosophy professor and an ex-courtesan of incomparable beauty. Two hundred years after his death, the great Haitian emperor Henri Christophe miraculously appears in a dream to Tankor Satani, president of the fictional West African country of Kissi, with instructions for Tankor to continue Henri Christophe's rule, which had been interrupted by "e;that damned Napoleon."e;Ambitious in scope, Sacred River is a diaspora-inspired novel, in which Cheney-Coker has tackled the major themes of politics, social strife, crime and punishment, and human frailty and redemption in Malagueta, the fictional, magical town and its surroundings first created by the author in The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, for which he was awarded the coveted Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Sacred River is equally about love and politics, and marks the return to fiction of one of Africa's major writers.