Writer
born 1945
Born in Freetown in 1945, he spent most of his adult life abroad. In the early 1990s he came home to edit the Freetown newspaper Vanguard; after the 1997 coup he was targeted as a dissident and barely escaped. His novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa.
Source ↗Books
We don't sell them: we only point to where to borrow or buy them.
The Road to Jamaica
Syl Cheney-Coker
2015
Sierra Leonean Writers Series
His first collection, written in the 1960s and held back for over forty years.
Concerto for an Exile
Syl Cheney-Coker
1973
Heinemann, African Writers Series
The Graveyard Also Has Teeth
Syl Cheney-Coker
1980
Heinemann, African Writers Series
The Blood in the Desert's Eyes
Syl Cheney-Coker
1990
Heinemann
Stone Child and Other Poems
Syl Cheney-Coker
2008
The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar
Syl Cheney-Coker
1990
Heinemann
Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Africa, 1991
Other poems
Their words are held back until we have permission to print them, or until we've found the whole poem.
Freetown
Concerto for an Exile (1973)
The Breast of the Sea
Read by him in the documentary film The Poets (Chivas DeVinck, 2018), filmed in Sierra Leone
Read it where it's published ↗Are you Syl Cheney-Coker, or family?
We'd like to print a poem or a passage here, or record you reading it aloud, with a link to the book so people can buy it. Nothing goes up until you agree in writing: an email saying yes is enough.
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