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Tsitsi Dangarembga is Zimbabwe’s first Black female novelist and is now one of the most well-known writers in the canons of Zimbabwean, anglophone African, and postcolonial women’s literature. Her 1988 Nervous Conditions has become one of the most widely read and widely taught novels in the African literary canon. Dangarembga’s published literary works include one play (She No Longer Weeps, 1987), three novels (Nervous Conditions, 1988; The Book of Not, 2006; and This Mournable Body, 2018), two short stories (“The Letter,” 1985; and “Jana Dives,” 2022), and one essay collection (Black and Female: Essays, 2022). Nervous Conditions won the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region); This Mournable Body was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2020, and since then Dangarembga has won the 2021 German Publishers and Booksellers Association’s Peace Prize, the 2021 PEN Pinter Prize, and the 2022 Windham Campbell Literature Prize for fiction. Dangarembga is also one of Zimbabwe’s most prominent filmmakers. The owner of her own production company, Nyerai Films, she has written, directed, or produced over twenty films, including Everyone’s Child (1996), On the Border (2000), Hard Earth: Land Rights in Zimbabwe (2001), Kare Kare Zvako: Mother’s Day (2004), High Hopes (2010), and I Want a Wedding Dress (2010). While all of Dangarembga’s published work casts a critical eye on postindependence Zimbabwean nationalism and government policy, she gained international visibility as a political activist in July 2020, when she was arrested for participating in a demonstration against the government’s persecution and arrest of journalist Hopewell Chin’ono. Dangarembga was convicted of inciting public violence in 2022; in 2023, that conviction was overturned. In 2021, she received the PEN International award for Freedom of Expression. In 2022–2023, she served as a Radcliffe Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Chinua Achebe, acclaimed as the “father of modern African literature,” came to canonical prominence thanks to the seismic impact of his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958)—the best-known work of African literature in the world—and his indictment of colonial discourse in the seminal essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Massachusetts in 1974. His influence and impact, however, far surpasses these two literary events. While Things Fall Apart was neither the first African novel nor the first to capture the trauma of the colonial encounter, Achebe’s transliteration of the Igbo language—its beauty, philosophy, and cadences of speech—in clear, eloquent prose, and his intimate knowledge and subversion of the Western literary tradition enthused literary critics around the world, inspired generations of African writers, and was key in instituting African literature as a field of scholarly inquiry. He further helped shape the direction of African writing in editorial roles—most notably as the founding editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series—and through his manifold critical and biographical essays, many of which preempt ideas at the core of postcolonial theory, albeit with a more accessible and mellifluous idiom. Over the course of his writing career, Achebe published five novels (Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease [1960], Arrow of God [1964], A Man of the People [1966], and Anthills of the Savannah [1987]), children’s books (Chike and the River [1966], How the Leopard Got His Claws [1972], The Flute [1977], and The Drum [1977]), two collections of short stories (The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories [1962] and Girls at War and Other Stories [1972]), two volumes of poetry (Beware, Soul Brother [1971] and Collected Poems [2004]), four collections of essays (Morning Yet on Creation Day [1975], Hopes and Impediments [1988], Home and Exile [2000], and The Education of a British-Protected Child [2008]), a political treatise (The Trouble with Nigeria [1983]), and his final work, There Was a Country (2012), a memoir on his experiences of the Nigerian Civil War.

Charles William (Dambudzo) Marechera (1952–1987) was born in poverty in Rusape, Zimbabwe and died in poverty in Harare, Zimbabwe. He was and continues to be celebrated as an iconoclast, the “enfant terrible” of African literature, and a cult figure with many acolytes across the globe. He was born in and formed by White-ruled Rhodesia (renamed Zimbabwe when independence was achieved in 1980) but was also deeply influenced by eight years in the United Kingdom and an immersion in European literature. The House of Hunger (1978) is Marechera’s most famous and impactful work. It is a stream-of-consciousness novella, published with nine other satellite stories, that is a semiautobiographical engagement with Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. The novella is simultaneously beautiful and brutal. The House of Hunger won the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979, and Marechera disrupted the awards dinner by dressing in an eclectic costume and throwing plates at the chandeliers. The book and Marechera were so celebrated that there was a Channel Four production that combined a biographical study of Marechera, documenting his time in the United Kingdom and his return to an independent Zimbabwe in 1982, and a film rendering of The House of Hunger. Unfortunately, there was an acrimonious break with the White South African filmmaker, Chris Austin. After his abrupt departure from the film project, Marechera stayed in Zimbabwe until his death five years later. In England and Zimbabwe, he wrote in a range of genres: prose, poetry, plays, essays, and even children’s literature. After the initial success of The House of Hunger, Marechera found it frustratingly difficult to publish his intellectual and esoteric work. Three books were published while he was alive (The House of Hunger, Black Sunlight, and Mindblast); three were published posthumously by his literary executor, Flora Veit-Wild (The Black Insider, Cemetery of Mind, and Scrapiron Blues). All six of these books were published between 1978 and 1994, but Marechera’s work continues to exert influence and make deep impressions on readers, whether formally trained or not, whether African or not. In addition to The House of Hunger, in Marechera’s essay “The African Writer’s Experience of European Literature” (1987), he embraces the influence of European literature on his own writing—a fidelity that is evident in his work and criticized by readers who prefer African writing that contributes to nation-building rather than privileges introspection. His essay demonstrates the breadth of his reading and the multifarious texts—from across the globe—that influenced all of Marechera’s work and captures his resistance to narrow labels that define writing and writers. Marechera continues to generate creative, critical, and theoretical responses from a variety of artists and thinkers from a range of locations—geographical, social, and racial, such as Yvonne Vera, NoViolet Bulawayo, China Miéville, Comrade Fatso, Helon Habila, and many more.