The Southern Hemisphere Fiction 100

In response to a ‘world’ list which left off most of the world, The Academy of New Zealand Literature has curated the best fiction from the Southern hemisphere.

In May, the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. published a list of ‘the greatest literature ever published in English’, AKA ‘The 100 best novels of all time’, depending on which page heading you prefer.

The people who nominated books for the Guardian list comprised ‘more than 170 novelists, critics and academics’, including many of the best writers of our time.’ They could include any book published in English, even if it was originally written in another language. The Guardian tallied these votes ‘to compile an overall 100’: these were then ‘ranked in order’.

One thing that was striking about the list: the bare inclusion of southern-hemisphere writers. At #75, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988); at #58, Disgrace by J.M Coetzee (1999); and at #53, Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard (1980).

How could a list of ‘the greatest literature ever published in English’ be so resolutely bound to the north? Among the excluded are Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (southern Kenya); Roberto Bolaño (Chile), Peter Carey (Australia) and Janet Frame (New Zealand), as well as Nobel literature laureates Patrick White (Australia); Nadine Gordimer (South Africa); Mario Vargas Llosa (southern Peru); and Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania).

So ANZL have created The Southern Hemisphere Fiction 100 - covering books from Southern Africa, Australia and southern Indonesia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, and Southern South America.

Read their full list and more about the project on the ANZL website.