Our #WCW is Tsitsi Dangarembga, a
Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and film maker. Tsitsi Dangarembga was born on 4 February 1959 in Mutoko, a small town where her parents taught at the nearby mission school.

She is a Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and film maker. Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions in 1988, which was the first to be published in English by a Black woman from Zimbabwe, was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world.

She has won other literary honours, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the PEN Pinter Prize. In 2020, her novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2022, Dangarembga was convicted in a Zimbabwe court of inciting public violence, by displaying, on a public road, a placard asking for reform.

Her mother, Susan Dangarembga, was the first black woman in Southern Rhodesia to obtain a bachelor’s degree. Her father later became a school headmaster. From the ages of two to six, Dangarembga lived in England, while her parents pursued higher education. Dangarembga, who had begun her education in England, enrolled at Hartzell Primary School, before going to board at the Marymount Mission convent school. She completed her A-Levels at Arundel School, an elite, predominantly white girls’ school in the capital, and in 1977 went to the University of Cambridge to study medicine at Sidney SussexCollege.

Dangarembga’s short story “The Letter” won second place in a writing competition arranged by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and was published in Sweden in the anthology Whispering Land.

Awards:
1989: Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Africa region) for Nervous Conditions
2005: Kare Kare Zvako wis the Short Film Award and Golden Dhow at the Zanzibar International Film Festival, and the African Short Film Award at the Milan Film Festival
2018: Nervous Conditions named by the BBC as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world

2020: This Mournable Body shortlisted for the Booker Prize
2021: PEN International Award for Freedom of Expression
2021: 2021 Peace Prize from the German book publishers and booksellers association
2021: Honorary Fellowship of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
2021: PEN Pinter Prize from English PEN
2022: Windham-Campbell Literature Prize (fiction