Walter Ellis Mosley is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California; they are perhaps his most popular works. In 2020, Mosley received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, making him the first Black man to receive the honor.
The Wind's Twelve Quarters is a collection of short stories by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, named after a line from A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, and first published by Harper & Row in 1975. A retrospective of Le Guin's short stories, it collects 17 previously published pieces of speculative fiction. Four of these were the germs of novels she was to write later, and a few others shared connections to Le Guin novels. At least four stories are set in the Hainish Universe, and two others in Earthsea. Many stories share themes and motifs, including time and utopia: certain images and characters also recur, including isolated scholars or explorers seeking knowledge in a hostile world.
Tsitsi Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker. Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions (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.
Charles Lovemore Mungoshi, was a Zimbabwean writer.
The National Arts Council of Zimbabwe (NACZ) is the official arts council for Zimbabwe. They award the annual National Arts Merit Awards (NAMA) in recognition of outstanding achievements in the arts and culture.
St. Ignatius College is a private Catholic secondary boarding school, located at Chishawasha, near Harare, in the Mashonaland East Province of Zimbabwe. The school was founded by the Society of Jesus in 1962 as the brother institution for St. George's College, Harare.
Jabari Asim is an American author, poet, playwright, and professor of writing, literature and publishing at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Crisis magazine, a journal of politics, ideas and culture published by the NAACP and founded by historian and social activist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910. In February 2019 he was named Emerson College's inaugural Elma Lewis '43 Distinguished Fellow in the Social Justice Center. In September 2022 he was named Emerson College Distinguished Professor of Multidisciplinary Letters.
Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean lawyer and writer. She writes in English, though she also draws on Shona, her first language. In 2016, she was named African Literary Person of the Year by Brittle Paper. In 2017 she had a DAAD Artist-in-Residence fellowship in Berlin.
Shimmer Chinodya is a Zimbabwean novelist.
Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian. He is the author of a novella, Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), a novel, Open City (2011), an essay collection, Known and Strange Things (2016), a photobook Punto d'Ombra, and a second novel, Tremor (2023). Critics have praised his work as having "opened a new path in African literature."
The Chautauqua Prize is an annual American literary award established by the Chautauqua Institution in 2012. The winner receives US$7,500 and all travel and expenses for a one-week summer residency at Chautauqua. It is a "national prize that celebrates a book of fiction or literary/narrative nonfiction that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and honors the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts."
Ignatius Tirivangani Mabasa is a Zimbabwean writer, storyteller, and musician, who writes mainly in Shona.
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is a Zimbabwe-born writer and professor of creative writing. She is the author of Shadows, a novella and House of Stone, a novel.
Brittle Paper is an online literary magazine styled as an "African literary blog" published weekly in the English language. Its focus is on "build(ing) a vibrant African literary scene." It was founded by Ainehi Edoro. Since its founding in 2010, Brittle Paper has published fiction, poetry, essays, creative nonfiction and photography from both established and upcoming African writers and artists in the continent and around the world. A member of The Guardian Books Network, it has been described as "the village square of African literature", as "Africa's leading literary journal", and as "one of Africa's most on the ball and talked-about literary publications". In 2014, the magazine was named a "Go-To Book Blog" by Publishers Weekly, who described it as "an essential source of news about new work by writers of color outside of the United States."
Valerie Tagwira is a Zimbabwean writer who is a specialist obstetrician-gynecologist by profession. Her debut novel The Uncertainty of Hope, published in 2006 by Weaver Press, won the 2008 National Arts Merit Awards (NAMA) Outstanding Fiction Book.
Sally Rooney is an Irish author and screenwriter. She has published three novels: Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018), and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). The first two were adapted into the television miniseries Normal People (2020) and Conversations with Friends (2022).
Sydney Taivavashe is a Zimbabwean film director, producer and screenwriter.
Irene Staunton is a Zimbabwean publisher, editor, researcher and writer, who has worked in literature and the arts since the 1970s, both in the UK and Zimbabwe. She is co-founder and publisher of Weaver Press in Harare, having previously co-founded Baobab Books. Staunton is the editor of several notable anthologies covering oral history, short stories, and poetry, including Mothers of the Revolution: War Experiences of Thirty Zimbabwean Women (1990), Children in our Midst: Voices of Farmworker's Children (2000), Writing Still: New Stories from Zimbabwe (2003), Women Writing Zimbabwe (2008), Writing Free (2011), and Writing Mystery & Mayhem (2015).
Weaver Press is a Zimbabwean independent publisher formed in 1998 in Harare. The press was co-founded by Irene Staunton, who has been credited with "quietly shaping post-independence Zimbabwean literature", with Murray McCartney, and the Press has published many notable African writers. Weaver's list focuses on books on political and social history, the environment, media issues, women's and children's rights, fiction and literary criticism.
The National Arts Merit Awards is a set of annual awards granted by the National Arts Council of Zimbabwe (NACZ) in recognition of outstanding achievements in the arts and culture.
