Ng’ang’a Wahu-Muchiri, associate professor in the Department of English, has earned the 2024 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize from the African Studies Association for Writing on the Soil: Land and Landscape in Literature from Eastern and Southern Africa.
The annual award recognizes the best book on East African studies published in the previous year, serving as a prestigious award in the transdisciplinary and international field of African studies. The committee considers books from any field in the humanities or social sciences, and four books were shortlisted this year.
The selection committee's summary:
"In Writing on the Soil, Ng’ang’a Wahu-Muchiri’s explores how representations of land and landscape perform metaphorical work in African literatures. In what he deftly defines as 'mystical realism,' Wahu-Muchiri encourages a contrarian reading of East Africa’s canon that emphasizes the nonhuman and supernatural in natural and fictional worlds. Utilizing archival research from multiple countries and continents, he situates each of his chapters in Kenyan, Ethiopian, Tanzanian, Zimbabwean, and Ugandan locales. The study’s transnational yet nuanced geographical range is coupled by the diversity of authors he selects for examination. Deploying brilliant interpretive energies radiating from his training in African Literature, Wahu-Muchiri attends to the writings of Grace Ogot (the first female author published in Eastern Africa), Moyez Vassanji, Berhane M. Sahle Sellassie, and others. Though rooted in East Africa, Writing on the Soil encourages readers across the disciplinary spectrum to ponder questions of broader and urgent import. How, for example, do nonhuman beings influence human identity-formation? How might reading beyond human life connect with our ongoing environmental crisis? Ng’ang’a Wahu-Muchiri has succeeded with a stunning work that is deeply researched, beautifully written, and perfectly suited for such a time as this."
The book was published by University of Michigan Press.
