Product details
- ISBN 9781035900862
- Weight: 600g
- Dimensions: 128 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jan 2024
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Winner of the 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. 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 to overthrow 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 paints the journey from precolonial Africa to its shaky independence.
Syl Cheney-Coker is a renowned poet, novelist, and journalist born in 1945 in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
He studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon and has taught at universities in the Philippines, Nigeria, and the US. He returned to Freetown in the early 1990s, becoming an editor of the progressive newspaper, Vanguard. After a political coup in 1997, however, Cheney-Coker was targeted for his criticism of Sierra Leone's military government and forced into exile. Alongside Wole Soyinka, another renowned and exiled writer, he relocated to the City of Asylum in Las Vegas, Nevada.
His poetry collections include The Road to Jamaica (1969), Blood in the Desert’s Eye (1990) and Stone Child and Other Poems (2008). His debut novel, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990) was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Africa Region) in 1991. The Sacred River (2014) was his long-awaited sequel and return to fiction.
Cheney-Coker returned to Sierra Leone in 2003 and now divides his time between there and the US.
