Manu Herbstein
Manu Herbstein (b. 1936 near Cape Town, South Africa) holds dual South African and Ghanaian citizenship. In the 1960s he worked as a civil and structural engineer in England, Nigeria, Ghana, India, Ghana again, Zambia and Scotland. He returned to Ghana in 1970 and has lived there since. He began writing seriously as he approached retirement. His first novel, Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book. It has been published in South Africa, India and Ghana. In the U.S.A, it is available from Amazon and Ingram and as an eBook. A companion website, www.ama.africatoday.com, is a rich repository of primary and secondary texts and images related to the novel. Brave Music of a Distant Drum, first published by Red Deer Press in Canada and the U.S. in 2011, is a sequel aimed at younger readers. Akosua and Osman won one of three 2011 Burt Awards for African Literature in Ghana. Ramseyer's Ghost is a dystopian/utopian political thriller set in Ghana in 2050. President Michelle or Ten Days that Shook the World is a short story aimed at U.S. readers. Manu's latest novel, The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti's Eye, received the U.S.-based African Literature Association's 2016 Book of the Year Award for Creative Writing, awarded for "an outstanding book of African literature."
Works

Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade
"I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, I have never been a slave, inside me here and here, I am still a free woman."
In the course of four hundred years some twelve million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic to serve European settlers and their descendants. Only the barest fragments of their stories have survived. Manu Herbstein's ambitious, meticulously researched and moving novel sets out to recreate one of these lives, following Ama, its eponymous heroine, from her home in the Sahel, through Kumase at the height of Asante power, and Elmina, centre of the Dutch slave trade, to a sugar plantation in Brazil.
"This is story telling on a grand scale," writes Tony Simões da Silva. "In Ama, Herbstein creates a work of literature that celebrates the resilience of human beings while denouncing the inscrutable nature of their cruelty. By focusing on the brutalization of Ama's body, and on the psychological scars of her experiences, Herbstein dramatizes the collective trauma of slavery through the story of a single African woman. Ama echoes the views of writers, historians and philosophers of the African diaspora who have argued that the phenomenon of slavery is inextricable from the deepest foundations of contemporary western civilization."
Akosua and Osman
President Michelle, or Ten Days that Shook the World
Ramseyer's Ghost
The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti's Eye
The Dibbuk
Brave Music of a Distant Drum
Building Bridges
The Car Doctors of Maamobi
Jai Hind
50 Years Ago: Zeke in Nigeria
Reflections in a Shattered Glass
Sankofa in Rhode Island
Have a Good Day
Suikerbossiestroopfontein
Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade
The Clock
Awards and Recognition
- Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book, 2002
- Burt Award for African Literature in Ghana (twice)
- African Literature Association's Book of the Year Award for Creative Writing, 2016