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Irish Independent
3 days ago
- General
- Irish Independent
‘Roughly what I expected' – Leaving Cert students react after first day of exams
Over 140,000 students sat down this morning to face English, the first of their Leaving Certificate exams. The Irish Independent caught up with two of these students for their reactions as they exited their exam hall. Ms Healy said: 'It was roughly what I expected. I really liked seeing Margaret Atwood on the paper. She's one of my favourite authors. And I also liked the personal essay." The Higher Level paper was topical and current from a reading comprehension on a speech given by Margaret Atwood and extracts from the Man Booker Prize Winner Orbital to a composition assignment tasking students with a podcast script. For the personal essay, Helena chose question 6 - 'In Text 2 Margaret Atwood refers to cherishing, 'democratic elections'. Write a personal essay in which you reflect on some of the factors that would influence your voting intentions in future elections'. 'I thought it was general enough where you could talk about anything that you were interested in, but it wasn't so broad that you wouldn't have enough ideas. Overall I thought the paper was really nice and hope I did well,' she said. Fred Movete (18), who sat Ordinary Level English Paper 1, was also happy with his paper. With love a theme across Ordinary Level paper 1, with Beatles' song 'All You Need is Love' in the mix, writing about universal experiences was key. He said: 'I definitely felt the pressure but once I started everything was ok. There was maybe one question [that caught me] but I think I will do great.' Mr Movete is looking forward to his history exam next Wednesday and hopes for an essay on the Nuremberg trials to come up on the paper next Wednesday. ADVERTISEMENT "It's my favourite subject, for the research study report I covered the CIA's secret programme MK-Ultra,' he said. Ms Healy and Mr Movete's year group were in first year when Covid-19 upended the nation. Nuala Brady, Deputy Principal, said: 'This would be the year group we would have worried for the most because they didn't get the proper foundation initially.' 'It's been a challenging couple of years for all post-Covid.' Leaving Certificate results this year will once again be artificially inflated through a post-marking adjustment which will be applied after all marking of individual papers has been completed. This was first introduced to compensate for students who missed out on classes due to school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic. Tomorrow students will take on English Paper 2 before Geography and Maths Paper 1 on Friday.
Boston Globe
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'Resistance is the best way of keeping alive,' he told the Guardian in 2018. 'It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you're right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive.' Advertisement He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former president Obama, who once praised Mr. Ngũgĩ's ability to tell 'a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.' Mr. Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012, and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award. Advertisement Through Mr. Ngũgĩ's life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963, and in his late 30s when his disillusion with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn't respond to British soldiers' demands that he stop moving. In a given book, Mr. Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, 'The Upright Revolution,' updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story 'The Ghost of Michael Jackson' features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Mr. Ngũgĩ's tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in 'The Wizard of the Crow,' in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies. 'Rumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy,' he wrote. 'When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist.' Advertisement Mr. Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country's divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country's liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native. One of five children born to the third of his father's four wives, he grew up north of Nairobi, in Kamiriithu village. He received an elite, colonial education and his name at the time was James Thiong'o. His formal writing career began through an act of invention. While a student at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, he encountered the editor of a campus magazine and told him he had some stories to contribute, even though he had not yet written a word. 'It is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one's destiny,' Nigerian author Ben Okri later wrote. 'Ngũgĩ wrote a story, it was published.' He grew ever bolder. At the African Writers Conference, held in Uganda in 1962, he met one of the authors who had made his work possible, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, who, following the acclaim of his novel 'Things Fall Apart,' had become an advisory editor to the newly launched African Writer Series publishing imprint. Mr. Ngũgĩ approached Achebe and urged him to consider two novels he had completed, 'Weep Not, Child' and 'The River Between,' both of which were released in the next three years. Advertisement Mr. Ngũgĩ was praised as a new talent but would later say he had not quite found his voice. His real breakthrough came, ironically, in Britain, while he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s at Leeds University. For the first time, he read such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul and was especially drawn to the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who wrote often of colonialism and displacement. 'He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world,' Mr. Ngũgĩ later wrote. 'And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence.' By the late 1960s, he had embraced Marxism, dropped his Anglicized first name and broadened his fiction, starting with 'A Grain of Wheat.' Over the following decade, he became increasingly estranged from the reign of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. He had been teaching at Nairobi University since 1967 but resigned at one point in protest of government interference. Upon returning, in 1973, he advocated for a restructuring of the literary curriculum. 'Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?' Mr. Ngũgĩ and colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba wrote. In 1977, a play he co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, 'I Will Marry When I Want,' was staged in Limuru, using local workers and peasants as actors. Like a novel he published the same year, 'Petals of Blood,' the play attacked the greed and corruption of the Kenyan government. It led to his arrest and imprisonment for a year, before Amnesty International and others helped pressure authorities to release him. Advertisement 'The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things,' he wrote in 'Wrestling With the Devil,' a memoir published in 2018. 'It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from above.' He didn't only rebel against laws and customs. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read 'I am stupid' or 'I am a donkey.' Starting with 'Devil On the Cross,' written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past. Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. But unlike Achebe, he insisted that Africans should express themselves in an African language. In 'Decolonizing the Mind,' published in 1986, Mr. Ngũgĩ contended that it was impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors. 'The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America,' he wrote. 'But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?' Advertisement He would, however, spend much of his latter years in English-speaking countries. Mr. Ngũgĩ lived in Britain for much of the 1980s before settling in the United States. He taught at Yale University, Northwestern University, and New York University, and eventually became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California Irvine, where he was founding director of the school's International Center for Writing & Translation. In Irvine, he lived with his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, with whom he had two children. He had several other children from previous relationships. Even after leaving Kenya, Mr. Ngũgĩ survived attempts on his life and other forms of violence. Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi, sent an assassination squad to his hotel while the writer was visiting Zimbabwe in 1986, but local authorities discovered the plot. During a 2004 visit to Kenya, the author was beaten and his wife sexually assaulted. Only in 2015 was he formally welcomed in his home country. 'When, in 2015, the current president, Uhuru Kenyatta, received me at the State House, I made up a line. 'Jomo Kenyatta sent me to prison, guest of the state. Daniel arap Moi forced me into exile, enemy of the state. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House,'' Mr. Ngũgĩ later told The Penn Review. 'Writing is that which I have to do. Storytelling. I see life through stories. Life itself is one big, magical story.'
The Independent
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Jamaica's past and present laid bare in Marlon James's superb crime thriller Get Millie Black
At first glance, it might seem odd for a writer as ambitious and celebrated as Marlon James (who won the Man Booker Prize in 2015 for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings) to attempt something as seemingly generic as an episodic TV crime thriller. But, as anyone familiar with his sprawling, complex and multi-faceted fiction will know, James can locate worlds within worlds – so why would the story of a missing girl be any different to his other creations? Millie Black's life is underpinned by loss. First, the death of her father, then her banishment as a teenager from her native Jamaica by her cruel mother after she attempted to defend her LGBT+ brother Orville. Eventually, the adult Millie (Tamara Lawrance, superb) washes up in London, working as a detective for the Met – but there's only so much bad food, damp weather and institutional racism she can take. When her mother dies, Millie takes it as a sign to return home. Much of James's writing centres around themes of transformation – and, as Millie joins the police in Jamaica and finds herself on the trail of a lost girl in Kingston (Janet Fenton, a straight-A student with secrets to hide), this theme asserts itself once again. Millie code-switches expertly between contexts. She alternates between yard-girl downtown patois and police jargon as necessary. But her homecoming is grounded in familial love, not professional ambition; she longs to reconnect with her brother. But Orville has transformed, too. She is now Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen) – a trans woman living a precarious life in Kingston's gullies, where LGBT+ people gather and brave the abuse and on occasion, the extreme violence – of local youths. Still, Hibiscus is distrustful of her sister and makes clear that she doesn't need saving. 'I not lost,' she says. 'I did always know me. Better to be Hibiscus out here than Orville everywhere else.' When Mille absent-mindedly deadnames her sibling, it threatens a rupture. These transformations are, in some cases, of existential importance. In a wider sense, Get Millie Black catches Jamaica in a state of flux, too, stuck between the trauma of a still-inescapable colonial past and tentative steps into the future. There is still a sense of hierarchy on the island, and of Mother England poking her nose in. The search for Janet soon widens to involve Millie's old pals at the Met when it begins to look like the playboy son of a local white family ('a rich boy who likes ghetto girls') is involved. When Inspector Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie) arrives from Scotland Yard, Millie is quizzical ('You come to colonise our case?'). But the story spirals outwards into something bigger. James specialises in multiple perspectives. On the page, this gives his writing a kaleidoscopic quality; on screen, it adds a further layer of tension – a generator of uncertainty that augments a detective drama perfectly. Each of the five episodes is told from a different character's point of view and even Holborn of the Yard gets one. It's a striking storytelling gambit, casting unreliable memory and disparate identity as a subjective driver of motive. There's a delicious psychological complexity at play throughout. In fact, the only minor false notes come in the occasionally expository dialogue around the detective elements – paradoxically, James is on surer ground dealing with the more impressionistic elements of his story. In James's hands, Jamaica itself is both a character and an abstract notion. In his novels, there's an endless curiosity about the diaspora and the ways in which this tiny island has spread outwards and interacted with the outside world. It has been transformed by globalisation but also exerted a huge and arguably outsize influence on other cultures too. 'Like every story about this country, this is a ghost story,' says Millie at the beginning, referring to the ghosts of both her own past and those of her country. And like any good ghost story, it's sometimes hard to get your bearings here. Get Millie Black is a drama to lean into. It doesn't make its essence immediately obvious. Like James's novels, it's both earthy and dreamily allusive; fragments of meaning and memory snagged in your peripheral vision. So eventually, while this is a literal detective story, it's also a figurative, emotional one – about identity, family, gender, self-image, and nationality. Even as the central mystery approaches some sort of resolution, the writing and performances, the perspectives and subjective points of view are compelling enough to leave these stories hanging alluringly. Get Millie Black lives and breathes. This might be a crime thriller, but it isn't just a crime thriller. In the right hands, a crime thriller can contain multitudes.
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
HARPERCOLLINS INDIA ANNOUNCES THE LAUNCH OF ITS NEW IMPRINT, BOOKTOPUS
NEW DELHI, March 4, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- HarperCollins Publishers India launches its new imprint Booktopus which will exclusively feature a range of high-quality, memorable books that foster curiosity and intellectual growth for pre-schoolers and early readers. Booktopus' mission is to inspire a love for learning in young children by creating engaging, fun and imaginative experiences. Tina Narang, Executive Publisher – HarperCollins Children's Books, says, "We are delighted to launch Booktopus, a new imprint for pre-schoolers, an age segment where there is a growing demand from parents and educators for engaging content. This exciting new imprint will include a wide range of books from novelty books that offer a hug and torch books with hidden pictures that light up; activity books filled with hours of fun to early learning with basic concepts, lift the flap and much, much more. We are sure young readers will not only love the books on offer but also the adorable Booktopus mascot as he extends an eight-arm-wide welcome inviting them to dive into fun and learning." As Ridwin Wadhawan, 3 years old, says, 'I love it!' And Mishka Sood, 5 years old, says, 'What a nice book!' as she flips through a Hug-Me book. The inaugural range includes Hug Me board books, Torch books, Puzzle books, Touch-and-Feel books, Slide board books, Sticker books, Build It kits, Lift-a-Flap books and My First 100 board books. About HarperCollins Publishers India HarperCollins India publishes some of the finest writers from the Indian subcontinent and around the world, publishing approximately 200 new books every year, with a print and digital catalogue of more than 2000 titles across 10 imprints. Its authors have won almost every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, JCB Prize, DSC Prize, New India Foundation Award, Atta Galatta Prize, Shakti Bhatt Prize, Gourmand Cookbook Award, Publishing Next Award, Tata Literature Live!, Gaja Capital Business Book Prize, BICW Award, Sushila Devi Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Crossword Book Award. HarperCollins India also represents some of the finest publishers in the world including Harvard University Press, Gallup Press, Oneworld, Bonnier Zaffre, Usborne, Dover and Lonely Planet. HarperCollins India is also the recipient of five Publisher of the Year Awards – in 2021 and 2015 at the Publishing Next Industry Awards, and in 2021, 2018 and 2016 at Tata Literature Live. HarperCollins India is a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers. Contact Details:Nisha Singh, Email: Photo: View original content to download multimedia:
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Harper Collins is proud to announce the publication of 'The 5 Types of Wealth' by Sahil Bloom
Published by HarperCollinsPaperback | Non-fiction | Self Help | 400 pp | INR 599Available wherever books are sold | Out Now Sahil Bloom's modern guide with the power to change your life. NEW DELHI , Feb. 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- HarperCollins Publishers India is delighted to announce the publication of 'The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life' by Sahil Bloom. ABOUT THE BOOK "A powerful call to action to think deeply about what lights you up."Tim Cook,CEO of Apple "Great storytelling, great takeaways and great wisdom."Susan Cain, Bestselling Author of Quiet DISCOVER THE 5 TYPES OF WEALTH AND DESIGN YOUR DREAM LIFE. After years of research and thousands of interviews worldwide, Sahil Bloom has created a groundbreaking blueprint centred around five types of wealth. Through science-backed practices and actionable insights, you will learn how to grow your: TIME WEALTHUnlock more time in your life. SOCIAL WEALTHCreate deeper bonds and build a powerful network. MENTAL WEALTHEngage your purpose to spark continuous growth. PHYSICAL WEALTHMaximise health and vitality through three simple principles. FINANCIAL WEALTHAchieve financial independence and define your version of 'enough'. It's a journey that can start today - and change your world faster than you thought possible. Sahil Bloom says, "I'm thrilled to finally share The 5 Types of Wealth with the world. The ideas in this book changed my life, and I'm confident they have the power to change yours. This book is your modern guide to identifying the things that truly matter to you, and then taking the action to build your life around those things. It's time we all reject the default and live by design." Sachin Sharma, Publisher, HarperCollins says, "This book is not just a great guide to find true wealth but also an eye opener for all who believed that money was the only type of wealth. By the time you finish reading it, you not only get richer with profound wisdom, your outlook towards what matters most in life transforms." ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sahil Bloom is an inspirational writer and content creator, captivating millions of people every week through his insights and bi-weekly newsletter, 'The Curiosity Chronicle'. Sahil is a successful entrepreneur, owner of SRB Holdings, and the managing partner of SRB Ventures, an early-stage investment fund. ABOUT HARPER COLLINS PUBLISHERS INDIA HarperCollins India publishes some of the finest writers from the Indian Subcontinent and around the world, publishing approximately 200 new books every year, with a print and digital catalogue of more than 3,000 titles across 10 imprints. Its authors have won almost every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, JCB Prize, DSC Prize, The Erasmus Prize, New India Foundation Award, Atta Galatta Prize, Shakti Bhatt Prize, Gourmand Cookbook Award, Publishing Next Award, Tata Literature Live! Award, Gaja Capital Business Book Prize, BICW Award, Sushila Devi Award, Sahitya Akademi Award, and Crossword Book Award. HarperCollins India also represents some of the finest publishers in the world including Harvard University Press, Gallup Press, Oneworld, Bonnier Zaffre, Usborne, Dover, Nosy Crow, and Quarto. HarperCollins India is India's most awarded publisher with seven Publisher of the Year Awards (2015, 2016, 2018, two in 2021, 2022, and 2024). HarperCollins India is a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers. Photo: View original content to download multimedia: Sign in to access your portfolio
