Stanley Nyamfukudza (born 1951) is a Zimbabwean writer.
He was born in Wedza District, Zimbabwe. In 1973, he was ejected from Salisbury University for participation in student riots against racism on the campus. From there, he moved to England where he was awarded a scholarship to study literature at the University of Oxford and completed a degree in English. He returned to an independent Zimbabwe in 1980. [1] [2]
Nyamfukudza has become one of Zimbabwe's longest established writers. [3] His 1980 work The Non-believer's Journey focuses on the war of liberation against colonialism. [4] Since then, he has published two collections of short stories: Aftermaths in 1980 and If God was a Woman in 1991. [5] He presented the plenary speech, titled "Reflections on Zimbabwe’s intellectual development", at the 2004 Nordic Africa Institute conference. [6]
The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a literary prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives international publicity which usually leads to a sales boost. When the prize was first created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014 it was widened to any English-language novel — a change that proved controversial. A seven person panel constituted by authors, librarians, literary agents, publishers, and booksellers is appointed by the Booker Prize Foundation.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1981.
Vikram Seth is an Indian novelist and poet. He has written several novels and poetry books. He has received several awards such as Padma Shri, Sahitya Academy Award, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, WH Smith Literary Award and Crossword Book Award. Seth's collections of poetry such as Mappings and Beastly Tales are notable contributions to the Indian English language poetry canon.
Florence Onyebuchi "Buchi" Emecheta was a Nigerian-born novelist, based in the UK from 1962, who also wrote plays and an autobiography, as well as works for children. She was the author of more than 20 books, including Second Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Most of her early novels were published by Allison and Busby, where her editor was Margaret Busby.
Chenjerai Hove, was a Zimbabwean poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both English and Shona. "Modernist in their formal construction, but making extensive use of oral conventions, Hove's novels offer an intense examination of the psychic and social costs - to the rural population, especially, of the war of liberation in Zimbabwe." He died on 12 July 2015 while living in exile in Norway and his death has been attributed to liver failure.
Alexander "Sandy" McCall Smith, CBE, FRSE, is a British writer, raised in Southern Rhodesia and these days an Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. He became a respected expert on medical law and bioethics and served on related British and international committees. He has since become known as a fiction writer, with sales in English exceeding 40 million by 2010 and translations into 46 languages. He is known as the creator of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. "McCall" forms part of his surname.
Dambudzo Marechera was a Zimbabwean novelist, short story writer, playwright and poet. His short career produced a book of stories, two novels, a book of plays, prose, and poetry, and a collection of poetry. He was best known for his abrasive, heavily detailed and self-aware writing, which was considered a new frontier in African literature, and his unorthodox behaviour at the universities from which he was expelled despite excelling in his studies.
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. In 2020, her novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Charles Lovemore Mungoshi, was a Zimbabwean writer.
African literature is literature from Africa, either oral ("orature") or written in African and Afro-Asiatic languages.
Len Rix is a translator of Hungarian literature into English, noted for his translations of Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight and The Pendragon Legend and of Magda Szabó's The Door and Katalin Street.
Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa, was a Nigerian author who has been called the mother of modern African Literature. She was the forerunner to a generation of African women writers, and the first African woman novelist to be published in the English language in Britain. She achieved international recognition with her first novel Efuru, published in 1966 by Heinemann Educational Books. While never considering herself a feminist, she was best known for recreating life and traditions from an Igbo woman's viewpoint.
Barbara T. Christian was an American author and professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Among several books, and over 100 published articles, Christian was most well known for the 1980 study Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition.
Raymond Keith Gilyard is a writer and American professor of English who teaches and researches in the fields of rhetoric, composition, literacy studies, sociolinguistics, and African American literature. Interested in the complex interplay among race, ethnicity, language, writing, and politics, his primary interest lies in identifying intersections of African American English and composing practices. Advocating African American English as a legitimate discourse, Gilyard has been a prominent voice in the movement to recognize ethnic and cultural discourses other than Standard English as valid. As a literary scholar and creative writer, his interests have been in the interplay among African American literature, rhetorical criticism, and bio-critical work.
Morgan Mahanya is a Zimbabwean Shona-language writer of detective fiction and war fiction. He has published 13 books since 1976, including books in Shona and in English, both fiction and nonfiction. Mahanya is one of the pioneering writers of detective stories in the Shona language. His books Chidamwoyo, Zvinoyera and The Wound are about the Rhodesian Bush War.
Barbara Makhalisa, also known by her married name as Barbara Nkala, is a teacher, Zimbabwean writer, Ndebele translator, novelist, editor and publisher, one of the earliest female writers published in Zimbabwe. She is the author of several books written in Ndebele, as well as in English, of which some have been used as school textbooks. Barbara is married to Shadreck Nkala. They have three adult children and six grandchildren.
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).
Flora Veit-Wild is a German literary academic, Professor of African Literatures and Cultures at Humboldt University, Berlin. She has published on the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, and on the body and madness in African literature.