Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in the former British colony of Rhodesia, now renamed Zimbabwe. After living in England and Germany during her formative years, she now resides in the land of her birth. She is a writer and filmmaker and her work, which has been awarded international prizes, captures the social heterogeneity of Africa from the feminist standpoint. Her novel Nervous Conditions (1988), now published in Catalan as Neguit permanent (L’Agulla Daurada, 2023), explores the patriarchy and the colonial legacy of a concentration of power in the hands of a white minority in Rhodesia. This is the opening novel of a semiautobiographical trilogy that has established her as one of Africa’s best women writers. This Mournable Body (Faber and Faber, 2020), the third book of the trilogy was nominated for the Booker Prize.

In addition to fiction, she writes plays, essays and is a film director, as well as being head of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust, an initiative that promotes all kinds of artistic projects around the continent. In 2022, she was in the news when she was prosecuted in Zimbabwe for participating in a peaceful demonstration that called for freedom of expression.