Winner of the Edward Stanford Prize for Fiction with a Sense of Place; 2019Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize; 2019Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize; 2019__________'Easily the best debut I've read this year; Tshuma's novel is both hilarious and horrifying; filled with compassion; anger and despair. [Her] unreliable narrator [is] of the kind that deserves to be remembered up there with Humbert Humbert' Kim Evans; Culturefly__________Bukhosi has gone missing. His father; Abed; and his mother; Agnes; cling to the hope that he has run away; rather than been murdered by government thugs. Only the lodger seems to have any idea... Zamani has lived in the spare room for years now. Quiet; polite; well-read and well-heeled; he's almost part of the family - but almost isn't quite good enough for Zamani. Cajoling; coaxing and coercing Abed and Agnes into revealing their sometimes tender; often brutal life stories; Zamani aims to steep himself in borrowed family history; so that he can fully inherit and inhabit its uncertain future. 

The first wound for all of us who are classified as “black” is empire.

In Black and Female, Tsitsi Dangarembga examines the legacy of imperialism on her own life and on every aspect of black embodied African life.

This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of race and gender. Dangarembga recounts a painful separation from her parents as a toddler, connecting this experience to the ruptures caused in Africa by human trafficking and enslavement. She argues that, after independence, the ruling party in Zimbabwe only performed inclusion for women while silencing the work of self-actualized feminists. She describes her struggles to realize her ambitions in theater, film, and literature, laying out the long path to the publication of her novels.

At once philosophical, intimate, and urgent, Black and Female is a powerful testimony of the pervasive and long-lasting effects of racism and patriarchy that provides an ultimately hopeful vision for change. Black feminists are “the status quo’s worst nightmare.” Dangarembga writes, “our conviction is deep, bolstered by a vivid imagination that reminds us that other realities are possible beyond the one that obtains.”

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZE

A searing novel about the obstacles facing women in Zimbabwe, by one of the country’s most notable authors

Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow’s boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.

In This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga returns to the protagonist of her acclaimed first novel, Nervous Conditions, to examine how the hope and potential of a young girl and a fledgling nation can sour over time and become a bitter and floundering struggle for survival. As a last resort, Tambudzai takes an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents’ impoverished homestead. It is this homecoming, in Dangarembga’s tense and psychologically charged novel, that culminates in an act of betrayal, revealing just how toxic the combination of colonialism and capitalism can be.