George Makana Clark
Agent: Isobel Dixon
Assistant: Finlay Charlesworth
Biography: George Makana Clark grew up in Zimbabwe (when it was called Rhodesia), and having been a musician, bush guide and lived in Germany, the Caribbean and South America, he now teaches Writing, African and Post-Colonial Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Winner of an O. Henry Award, Honourable Mention in the Pushcart Prize, and short-listed for the Caine Prize, his stories are widely published in journals like Zoetrope and Tin House and in his collection THE SMALL BEES' HONEY (US: White Pine Press, 1997). His work is included in The New Granta Book of the African Short Story (2011).
THE RAW MAN
Literary fiction, 330 pages
Jonathan Cape Ltd
A remarkable, revelatory debut set in Southern Africa, where a young man who has the gift, or curse, of being a ‘blood reader’, struggles to unravel his family’s secrets and grapples with his own troubled past. In sections oscillating between the material and spiritual worlds we learn Sergeant Gordon’s story in reverse, from the military in the Rhodesian Bush War, to adolescent rebellion, the brutal initiations of youth, back to childhood, birth and ancestry.
‘An extraordinary novel, and a work of rare conception, bringing together, within one individual, the painfully conflicted history of southern Africa.’ -- Brian Chikwava, author of HARARE NORTH