Jeremy Harding
speaker
341 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Jeremy Harding’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, I mean, a lot of them, but not all of them.
I mean, I think it's changed completely.
I mean, I think I talked about the old guard
you know, these venerable modernist novelists and poets who emerged sort of in the 50s as Team Africa, because that's how they were presented to us, whether they were Kenyan or Nigerian or wherever they were coming from.
It was all much of a muchness, you know, these African guys.
but they were presented to an Anglophone audience by the African Writers' Series, which was started by Heinemann at the end of the 50s.
And it really, really was an amazing thing to suddenly have access to all these writers writing in English from Africa.
It was a big deal for all of us, I think.
And a similar thing has happened in France with Présence Africaine, which began at the end of the war, end of the 40s, 49, I think.
They started publishing a lot of stuff coming out of Francophone Africa.
But these are grandees, you know.
It seems to me, looking back, that the people we're thinking about, it's Chinua Achebe.
It's Ngugi Wa Thiong'o.
It's Nadine Cordimer.
It's a whole host of less famous but equally accomplished writers who've got the grand project of sort of telling us about what colonialism was and what neocolonialism shaped up to become and then became.
So it was quite clear what the thing was.
When you get to Binyavanga Wanano's day, which I think begins really in the early noughts when he wins the Kane Prize for African writing, the landscape's changed completely.
The ideas that Presence Africaine and the Heinemann Writers Series had of actually creating a network of bookshops,
publishing warehouses all over Africa has collapsed.
Presence Africaine is, you know, forced back largely on Paris.
Showing 181–200 of 341 · page 10 of 18
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