Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in Mutoko, Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe), in 1959. She attended Cambridge University but returned to her homeland just as it became Zimbabwe under black-majority. She enrolled in the University of Harare and became active in a theater group, directing, writing, and acting in plays, and began writing fiction. She published her first novel, Nervous Conditions, the first by a black Zimbabwean woman to be published in English, at twenty-five. The novel was awarded the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Dangarembga later studied film at the Deutsche Film und Fernseh Akademie and made several films. Her 1996 film Everyone’s Child was shown at various international festivals, including the Dublin Film Festival. In 2006, she published The Book of Not: A Sequel to Nervous Conditions.