John Eppel – författare

"e; It is New Year in Bulawayo, and anybody who is anybody is out celebrating. Hatchings, with an introduction by Khombe Mangwanda, was chosen by Professor Anthony Chennells in the Times Literary Supplement as his choice for the most significant book to have come out of Africa. "e;"e;The story is simple. In a sentence it can be described as a love story centered on a young couple who discover the true power of love amid the social, economic and moral decay that threatens to swallow their love and everything else. But to say Hatchings is merely a love story would be criminal. It is more than that. Hatchings is a story about Bulawayo, about Zimbabwe, about corruption and cultural decay. In Hatchings John Eppel spares no one. With his sharp and yet witty pen he exposes corruption and pokes fun at those that are abusing power and this means literally everyone. Rich, poor, white, black , Indian, foreigner or local."e;"e; - Raisedon Baya, Sunday News, Zimbabwe"e;

White Man Crawling is a collection of short stories and poems by the award winning Bulawayo writer John Eppel. His stories are uncomfortably funny; his poems uncomfortably sad. His stories speak first to all of us, then to his own quirky nature; his poems speak first to himself and to those few who know him nearly, and then to all of us. For more than forty years John Eppel has been a unique double-voice in the annals of Zimbabwean literature: the satirist and the lyricist.

Suburban and cosmopolitan, youthful and elderly, formal and experimental� these binaries twist like threads which meet in this anthology, and interweave on the loom of prosody, forming rich and varied textures, Few can craft poems with the skill of these two artisans from Zimbabwe.

These short stories by Zimbabwean poet and novelist, John Eppel, are not for the politically correct. Eppel should have listened to the wise words of Enobarbus in Shakespeare,s Antony and Cleopatra: ,That the truth should be silent, I had almost forgot,. But, once a fool, always a fool. In White Man Walking, you will find semi-fictionalised accounts of greed, cruelty, and corruption; idiocy, naivety, and irresponsibility. Oh, and there are occasional moments of tenderness!

When Mr George loses his job teaching English at a private secondary school in Bulawayo, ,his pension payout, after forty years of full-time service, bought him two jam doughnuts and a soft tomato., When he backs his uninsured white Ford Escort into a brand new Mercedes Benz, the out-of-court settlement sees him giving up his house to the complainant, Beauticious Nyamayakanuna, and becoming her domestic servant. Through the prism of this engaging post-colonial role reversal, and spiced with George,s lessons on Shakespeare, John Eppel draws down the curtain on one particular white man in Africa. But before it,s time to go, George will delight us with the antics of his literature classes; his various arrests , all timed to coincide with the police chief,s need for help with essays on Hamlet and A Grain of Wheat; his keen eye for flora and fauna; and the long trek back through the hundred years of his family,s Zimbabwean past, as he returns an abandoned child to her home. Eppel has satirized the racial politics of southern Africa in many of his previous novels. In Absent: The English Teacher he turns his gaze inwards for a generous and richly rewarding parody of the land of his birth.