Tsitsi Dangarembga

1. Identity

• Full name: Tsitsi Dangarembga (no pen name)
• Nationality: Zimbabwean. Born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); lives in Harare.
• Language of writing: English
• Other practices: playwright, screenwriter, film director, producer, cultural activist

2. Biography

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born on 4 February 1959 in Mutoko, Southern Rhodesia. Her parents taught at the nearby mission school, and her mother, Susan, was among the country’s first Black women to earn a university degree [to be verified]. She spent part of her early childhood in England, returned home, and in the late 1970s went to Cambridge to study medicine. She came back before independence in 1980 and took up psychology at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare.

That is where she began to write, between the university drama club and a job as an advertising copywriter. Plays came first, because the stage had so few roles for women, and then a novel. Turned down by Zimbabwean publishers, Nervous Conditions appeared in London in 1988. It was the first novel published in English by a Black Zimbabwean woman.

She then turned to the moving image. She studied directing at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin and founded Nyerai Films in Harare in 1992. She wrote the story for Neria and directed Everyone’s Child (1996), the first feature film made by a Black Zimbabwean woman. After returning to Zimbabwe in 2000, she founded an international festival of films by women. Over thirty years, she followed Tambu’s life to its conclusion in This Mournable Body (2018).

In July 2020 she was arrested in Harare for walking with a placard calling for reform. She was convicted in 2022 and acquitted on appeal in 2023. The question of what free speech costs, already at the heart of her first novel, had reached her own life.

3. Published works

Novels (the Tambudzai trilogy)

• Nervous Conditions, London, The Women’s Press, 1988 (US edition: Seattle, Seal Press, 1989)
  • French translation: À fleur de peau, trans. Étienne Galle, Paris, Albin Michel, 1991; reissued by L’École des loisirs, Médium poche, 1993
• The Book of Not, Banbury, Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2006 [publisher to be verified]. French translation: none identified [to be verified].
• This Mournable Body, Minneapolis, Graywolf Press, 2018 (UK edition: Faber & Faber, 2020)
  • French translation: Ce corps à pleurer, trans. Nathalie Carré, Montréal, Mémoire d’encrier, 2023

Essays

• Black and Female, London, Faber & Faber, 2022. French translation: none identified [to be verified].

Drama

• The Lost of the Soil (1983)
• She No Longer Weeps (published in Harare, 1987)
• The Third One [date to be verified]

Short fiction

• “The Letter”, in Whispering Land: An Anthology of Stories by African Women, Sweden, 1985

Film (selection)

• Neria: author of the story. Dated 1991 or 1993 depending on the source [to be verified].
• Everyone’s Child (1996): director and co-writer
• Kare Kare Zvako: Mother’s Day (2005)
• Ungochani (2010)

Prizes and honours

• Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Africa region (1989), for Nervous Conditions
• Booker Prize shortlist (2020), for This Mournable Body
• PEN International Award for Freedom of Expression (2021)
• PEN Pinter Prize (2021)
• Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2021), its first Black woman laureate
• Windham-Campbell Prize, fiction (2022)
• PEN Català Free Voice Award (2023) [to be verified]
• Spendlove Prize (2024) [to be verified]
• Nervous Conditions appears on the BBC’s 2018 list of 100 stories that shaped the world.

4. Presence in the Susu library

• Nervous Conditions (À fleur de peau, 1988): book fiche published