Patrice Nganang and Eddie Glaude Jr. | Book Launch: 'Scale Boy: An African Childhood'

Patrice Nganang is the author of more than fifteen books, including the award-winning novels Dog Days (The University of Virginia Press), Mount Pleasant (FSG), When The Plums Are Ripe (FSG), and A Trail of Crab Tracks (FSG). A Trail of Crab Tracks has been chosen amongst the books of the year 2022 by The New Yorker, and When The Plums Are Ripe as one of the books to read by the Washington Post in 2019. His writing has been praised by The Washington Post as ‘powerful’, by the Vanity Fair as ‘an absolutely stunning swirl of Cameroonian colonial history, art, and passion’, by The New Yorker as ‘elegiac.’ A recent portrait of him in The new Yorker puts his novels alongside Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s and Sembène Ousmane’s, as ‘most artistically successful examples’ that since Walter Scott, ‘partake in the project of nation-building by reimagining the past’, and adds that ‘the blurring of genre distinctions fueled his novelistic ambitions, expanding his conception of what a fiction writer might hope to achieve.’ An equally laudatory portrait in The New York Times asserts that his writing borrows ’from his own life, from the daily rituals of suburban America to the lyrical descriptions of his hometown.’

Reception immediately following in the Africa World Initiative suite, 245 Corwin Hall.