Hunger and the Artist: Interviewing Windham Campbell Prizewinner Helon Habila

April 1, 2015 | in Interviews | by Nicole Idar

An interview with Nigerian author Helon Habila, winner of a 2015 Windham Campbell Prize in Fiction

The Windham Campbell Prize, launched just two years ago, has quickly become one of the most sought-after literary awards in the world, offering recipients the financial freedom to write with a $150,000 no-strings-attached grant. This year, Nigeria-born Helon Habila, author of the novels Waiting for an Angel (Norton, 2002), Measuring Time (Norton, 2007), and Oil on Water (Norton, 2010), received a Windham Campbell Prize in the Fiction category. Established by Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell, who were artists themselves, the prize recognizes writers writing in English from anywhere in the world.

Nicole Idar: The Windham Campbell Prize was inspired by Donald Windham’s own experiences as a young writer struggling to support himself, and in your own work you’ve written about young writers faced with this very struggle—Diaz, the narrator and aspiring journalist in “The Hotel Malogo,” for example. When you were first starting out as a writer, you worked as an editor for several years in Lagos. How has this struggle to balance art with financial security shaped you as a writer?

Helon Habila: Hunger, both metaphorical and literal, is always good for the artist. It sharpens your focus and drives you on. There’s a beautiful essay by Ben Okri on this subject, published in the British Council’s New Writing anthology a long time ago. It is based on his own experiences as a struggling writer in London. He describes how hunger would literally wake you up at night and drive you to the writing desk. But of course the best work on this subject for me is Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Yet, when the hunger becomes too much, it becomes a burden, not a helper. You might, for instance, find yourself writing about food for no discernible reason. I wrote my first book mostly hungry, with no computer, and by candle light because our electricity wasn’t working. This was in Lagos. I had to go to work at 7 am, and get home at around 7 pm, rest for a few hours and start writing by candle light till around 3 am. Then rest and go to work at 7 am. It was tough, but it shaped me in so many ways. I am glad that book worked out, it went on to win the Caine Prize and got me my first book deal with Penguin and Norton. It would have been devastating if it didn’t. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Nicole Idar

Place:

Nigeria

Writer:

Helon Habila

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September News from Asymptote’s Editors and Contributors

September 29, 2014 | in News | by Eva Richter

While editing Asymptote’s upcoming October issue, they’ve translated books, written reviews, and won prizes!

Contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursać saw her translation of the short story “Marilyn Monroe, My Mother,” by Neda Miranda Blažević-Kreitzman, appear in the Buenos Aires Review. In further exciting translation news: Elias-Bursać’s Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan this February. In it, she discusses translation and interpretation at the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague.

Drama editor Caridad Svich has big happenings in October, including readings and productions across the United States (and in London too!). Check out a full schedule of them all here.

Joshua Craze, nonfiction editor, has just finished a residency at the Dar Al Ma’Mûn in Morocco, where he was a UNESCO-Aschberg Artist Laureate in Creative Writing, working on his novel Redacted Mind. Excerpts from another book project, How To Do Things Without Words, are currently on display at the New Museum in New York, as part of its Temporary Center for Translation. He just finished a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and has taken a position on the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago.

Crime on the Island: Interviewing Cheryl Tan of “Singapore Noir”

August 6, 2014 | in Interviews | by Nicole Idar

An interview with Cheryl Tan, editor of the first Singaporean crime fiction anthology published in the United States

Singapore has one of the world’s lowest homicide rates, but much like its partner in (low) crime, Iceland, it’s fertile ground for noir stories. Launched this month, ten years after the release of Brooklyn Noir, is Brooklyn-based Akashic Books’ newest title in its bestselling series of Noir anthologies, Singapore Noir, edited by the Singaporean writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, a former staff writer at the Wall Street Journal and author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family.

Nicole Idar: Singapore is the fourth Asian city to boast an Akashic Books Noir anthology, after Delhi, Manila, and Mumbai (Seoul is forthcoming). Can you tell us how Singapore Noir came about?

Cheryl Tan: I’d long admired New York publisher Akashic Books’ award-winning Noir series—a series of anthologies, and there are dozens by now, each one set in a country or a city. Brooklyn Noir was a personal favorite but you also have everything from Baltimore Noir to Paris Noir. Some really big names have edited these collections of dark stories set in these locales—Joyce Carol Oates edited New Jersey Noir, for example, and Dennis Lehane edited Boston Noir.

In November 2011, I was at the Miami Book Fair, speaking about A Tiger in the Kitchen, my first book. At the authors’ party, mystery writer extraordinaire S.J. Rozan introduced me to Johnny Temple, Akashic’s publisher. I told Johnny how much I loved his noir series but asked why there hadn’t been a Singapore Noir. He said it was because he didn’t know any Singaporean writers. And S.J. said, “Well now you do.”