Petina Gappah is the author of the short story collections An Elegy for Easterly and Rotten Row, and of the novels The Book of Memory and Out of Darkness, Shining Light. The following is an excerpt from her opening speech at the International Literature Festival in Berlin, delivered on 11 September 2019. I Across the […]
Tag Archives: zimbabwean literature
Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger Out in Chinese
The iconic Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger has been translated into Chinese. First published in 1978 as part of Heinemann’s African Writers Series, the book is a collection of a novella and nine satellite short stories, and has widely been noted as a commentary on the author’s own troubled, tragically short life. […]
Tendai Huchu Lands Two-Book Deal with Tor, including Novel Compared to TV Series Stranger Things
Tor has acquired the rights to two books by the Zimbabwean novelist Tendai Huchu. The publishing press’ editorial director Bella Pagan bought world rights from his agent, Jamie Cowen at Ampersand Agency, while the press’ US executive editor Will Hinton acquired North American rights from Pan Macmillan. The first of the books, The Library of […]
Read the First Excerpt from Petina Gappah’s New Novel, Out of Darkness, Shining Light
Petina Gappah‘s new novel Out of Darkness, Shining Light was released on 10 September by Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner. Told by a woman and a man, it details the 285-day journey by a party carrying the Irish explorer Dr. David Livingstone’s dead body to the Indian Ocean coast. The publication of the highly anticipated […]
Charles Mungoshi’s Quiet Influence on Zimbabwean Literature | Tinashe Mushakavanhu
It is no exaggeration to say that Charles Mungoshi, who died on 16 February in Harare, aged 71, was one of the most important writers both in English and in a local language—in this case, Shona—to come out of Africa. Less flamboyant than his namesake Charles ‘Dambudzo’ Marechera, Mungoshi was a prose master of understated […]
On the Shutdown of Zimbabwe | Tinashe Tafirenyika
The television is on mute, I can’t switch it off because I need the illusion of company. Everyone turned in early tonight. I am restless. In four days I’ve barely left the house, I almost miss my low-paying dead-end job. At least it gives me some sense of purpose. Today was particularly hard, with the […]
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