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Leila Aboulela is a Sudanese writer and playwright, currently based in Scotland. She won the first Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000, and is the author of three acclaimed novels, including Lyrics Alley, which won the 2011 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year and was listed for the Orange and Commonwealth Writers prizes.
Our book give-away for the month of April is Lyrics Alley, a novel by Sudanese author, Leila Aboulela. First published in 2011 by Grove Press, Lyrics Alley is the evocative story of an affluent Sudanese family shaken by the shifting powers in their country and the near-tragedy that threatens the legacy they’ve built for decades.
In Minaret, Leila Aboulela continues her exploration into the cross-cultural topics that she embarked on in her award-winning debut novel, The Translator (1999). Against the backdrop of multicultural London communities with its intricate class and religious tensions, the author builds a multifaceted story around Najwa, the central figure and first-person narrator, as she searches for her place among the city’s diverse milieus
Aboulela’s brief, yet rich, novel is not only a delicate moving love story, told primarily from the heroine’s perspective, it also touches, in a broader sense, on general human emotions such as longing and belonging, tradition and change, loss, faith and personal growth.
Leila Aboulela’s latest book, Lyrics Alley recently won the 2011 Scottish Book of the Year Award and made the shortlist for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book). Aboulela is also a past winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, which she received in 2000 for her short story The Museum. In this interview, Aboulela talks about finding her voice as a writer.
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