ONDJAKI
ANGOLA
PROSE, POETRY, DRAMA, LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE
ndjaki has many strings to his bow. He writes poetry, books for children and young people, short stories, novels, drama and film scripts. He is also a captivating storyteller. And he paints. He has also made a film about Luanda, the capital of Angola and Ondjaki’s hometown, where he was born in 1977. At university in Lisbon he studied sociology and for his thesis wrote on the Ango- lan author, Luandino Vieira.
So far, Ondjaki has written four novels, three collections of short stories, two collections of poems and three children’s books. His novel O Assobiador (The Wissler) was published in Swedish in 2009. It is an enchantingly poetic and beautiful description of the mystical stranger who sneaks into the action, changes people’s lives and disappears equally unnoticed.
His debut novel, Bom dia camaradas, from 2001 is a childhood memoir of the Luanda of the 1990s, a humorous description of everyday adventures in a city marked by a civil war that had been going on for decades. In 2010, Tranan published the Swedish translation under the title God morgon, kamrater. Both these novels were translated by Yvonne Blank. A collection of poetry was published in Portuguese in 2006.
Ondjaki has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Chinese and Swedish.
O
ONDJAKI caught between appearances.
More than 1,300 journalists reported froM the fair.
