Africa Writes Back: Heinemann African Writers Series — A Publisher’s Memoir

Abstract

The African Writers Series was founded in 1962, almost exactly 25 years after the start of Penguin books. The paperback Series was to become to Africans, in its first quarter century, what Penguin Books had been to British readers in its first 25 years. It provided good serious reading at accessible prices for the rapidly emerging professional classes as the countries became independent. The colour orange for novels had been shamelessly copied from Penguin. By the time of its tenth anniversary in 1972, it had come to be called in Africa the ‘orange series’ and was stacked high in the key positions inside the entrances of the university campus bookshops, from one side of Africa to the other. The writer and critic Edward Blishen said at the time of the tenth anniversary in 1972: ‘I shall tell my grandchildren that I owe most of what education I have to Penguins and that through the African Writers Series I saw a new, potentially great, world literature coming into being.’¹