Bookish Sort Explorer (Book Addict)

For my reader confessions, I have an incurable obsession with books that furnish my room as well as my entire life. I read everything; huge volumes, daily news, manuals, posters, paintings, medical prescriptions and packages of confectionary.

Whenever I am reading, I don’t get hungry. When I hear a call, I get angry and I don’t pick because I prefer not to respond. I don’t like to stir once I have opened a page. I also find it easier to bury my insomnia and sometimes stress in heaps of ink and paper or word processor. I like reading because then I can easily swim through oceans of knowing towards the shores of reality that seem less to be real with my usual (idealist mind in instances when I am not reading). And in no minute I can make it to all continents and understand their oceanic boundaries.

I sometimes feel terribly sorry for the fact that I owe a lot to writers but I devotedly omit that fact, because they write for themselves and their loyal readers; besides they are cunning enough to take all my love and my penny too! I digest most of the writings from love. The textures, colors and smell of books old or new have become familiar to me as my own perfume nearly to the air I breathe. 

The book is the sole specimen I have ever tried to resemble millions of beliefs and disagreements that may tend to overpower my consciousness and above all creating in me an instinct to generously correct the opinions of other minds wholeheartedly by liking them first and leave their facts intact. I find it liberating to take a daily word sacrament and being a literary glutton as well as an honest (ADHD) word worm a little too much is better for my hours. Books are my life. How else could I be?

(c) Atutambira Allen

Secrets about Lamwaka of the Caine Prize

L-A-M-W-A-K-A 2011 CAINE!!!!!!!!

She comes from Alokolum in Gulu and studied at Kangole Girls’ Primary School in Karamoja where she fled with her bitutwa (Bitutwa are plaits that look like black maggots) flying in the wind, as a result of the unrest in Gulu. Labeaty, is what her close friends call her. Her first email address was labeaty2001@yahoo.com.

Do you remember when we first got email addresses which had years tagged to them? If you got your email address in 2012 then you were seemefly2012@hilarious.com. Labeaty was one of those people.

At FEMRITE, which she joined in 1999, while still an undergraduate at Makerere University, scrimmaging for literary abundance which was in plenty while Goretti still its Coordinator then, would dole out.

So anyway, Labeaty is one of those phlegmatics who does not really prescribe to the template of phlegs and she really likes eating bananas and taking tea with entangawizi. Why am I talking about Beatrice? She was shortlisted for the Caine Prize, she is my dear friend and I am the only interviewer so far who knew that she studied from Kangole Girls, which by the way is on the internet, mbu they used to wear cute short blue sleeveless dresses for uniform.

Labeaty says that you pick the uniform from the school and leave them there. (Giggle giggle). So, she has been shortlisted for the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story, Butterfly Dreams which was published in 2010 in the anthology entitled Butterfly Dreams and other stories by CCC press in the UK.

We are certain the prize will come to East Africa again, because others on the short list are from SADC. Raise your glasses as we toast, raise your bananas as we boast, Beatrice Lamwaka.

from bnpoetryaward.blogspot.com