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.
