Teju Cole

Teju Cole (2013)

Teju Cole (born June 27, 1975 in Kalamazoo , Michigan as Obayemi Babajide Adetokunbo Onafuwa ) is a Nigerian-American writer , photographer and art historian .

Life

Teju Cole was born in the United States to Nigerian parents, but grew up in Lagos , Nigeria . He returned to the United States at the age of seventeen. He studied art history and medicine at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan (BA), at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (MA) and at New York's Columbia University (M.Phil .; Ph.D. Candidate). He is a permanent contributor to the New York Times , the South African cultural magazine Chimurenga , the New Yorker , Transition magazine , the American Tin House magazine and the English-language literary magazine A Public Space . He lives in Brooklyn and has taught as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College in New York since 2011 . From June to November 2014 he was Writer in Residence at the Literaturhaus Zürich and the PWG Foundation in Zürich.

Cole stayed in Lagos in 2005 and, back in New York, wrote a blog in 2006, which was published in 2007 in 27 sketches as the book Every Day is for the Thief at a small publishing house in Abuja . The sold circulation after three years was 5000 copies, which according to Cole is a lot for a country with a tiny middle class. The book was published in the USA in 2014 after Cole's success with Open City . The novel's unnamed protagonist returns to Lagos after fifteen years in New York City , only to feel changed by living abroad and confused by the city.

Works (selection)

• Every day is for the Thief. Fiction . With 21 photos by the author. Abuja, Nigeria: Cassava Republic Press, 2007, ISBN 978-978-080-515-9 .
  • Every day belongs to the thief . Translation: Christine Richter-Nilsson. Berlin: Hanser Berlin, 2015, ISBN 978-3-446-24772-7
• Open City. A novel . Random House, New York 2011, ISBN 978-1-4000-6809-8 .
  • Open City. Translation: Christine Richter-Nilsson. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-518-42331-8 .
• Familiar things, strange things , German by Uda Strätling. Hanser Berlin, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-446-25294-3 .
• Blind spot . London: Faber, 2017
  • Blind spot, German by Uda Strätling. Hanser Berlin, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-446-25850-1 .
• Human Archipelago . with Fazal Sheikh . Steidl Verlag , Göttingen, 2019 ISBN 978-3-95829-568-1 .

Awards

• 2001 and 2002 Andrew W. Mellow Fellow
• 2011 finalist at the National Book Critics Circle Award with Open City
• 2011 The New York City Book Award (Fiction) for Open City
• 2011 Open City in Time's Top Ten Fiction Books
• 2012 Hemingway Foundation PEN Award for Open City
• 2012 invitation to the International Literature Festival Berlin
• 2012 Rosenthal Foundation Award for Open City
• 2013 International Literature Prize - House of World Cultures for Open City
• 2015 Windham – Campbell Literature Prize in the Fictional category.

Web links

Commons : Teju Cole  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Teju Cole in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Teju Cole in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• Teju Cole in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Homepage of the artist
• Ekkehard Knörer: Interview with Teju Cole in Merkur , October 8, 2012
• Reading 2012 in Berlin on YouTube
• Unmournable Bodies , The New Yorker , Jan. 9, 2014
• Teju Cole on the Steidl Verlag website
• Deutschlandfunk essay and discourse from January 5, 2020: Identities (5/7): Black body

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Teju Cole on the pages of the Zaccheus Onumba Dibiaezue Memorial Libraries
2. ↑ Teju's academic biography at the Bard Faculty
3. ↑ Writers in Residence Zurich website ( Memento of the original from February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Wieland Freund : "Death in the Mediterranean is Europe's flaw" . Interview, in: The Literary World , June 27, 2015, p. 7
5. ↑ Martin Zähringer: Teju Cole - Concentrated prose montage about Africa , review, on Deutschlandfunk from March 19, 2015
6. ↑ I stole away in: FAZ of February 4, 2015, page 10
7. ↑ Volker Weidermann : Bang, bang, bang! , FAS review of February 1, 2015, p. 33
8. ^ Homepage of the New York Society Library
9. ^ Time list from Dec. 7, 2011
10. ↑ List of winners of the Family Foundation Award ( memento of the original from January 31, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.