Tendai Huchu

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Tendai Huchu
Swecon 2024 (Fantastika) 88.jpg
Huchu in 2024
Born (1982-09-28) 28 September 1982 (age 42)
Bindura, Zimbabwe
OccupationAuthor
Alma mater University of Zimbabwe
Notable works The Hairdresser of Harare (2010),
The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician (2014)

Tendai Huchu (born 28 September 1982) [1] [2] who also writes as T. L. Huchu is a Zimbabwean author, best known for his novels The Hairdresser of Harare (2010) [3] and The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician (2014).

Contents

Early life

Huchu was born in Bindura, Zimbabwe in 1982. [1] [4] He received most of his education in English, rather than Shona, his first language. Huchu emigrated to the UK in 2002 for economic opportunities. [4]

Career

Tendai Huchu's first novel, The Hairdresser of Harare, was released in 2010 to critical acclaim, and has been translated into German, French, Italian and Spanish. His short fiction in multiple genres and nonfiction have appeared in Enkare Review , The Manchester Review, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine , Gutter, Interzone, AfroSF, Wasafiri , Warscapes, The Africa Report and elsewhere. In 2013, he received a Hawthornden Fellowship and a Sacatar Fellowship. He was shortlisted for the 2014 Caine Prize.

As of 2015, he is a podiatrist in Edinburgh. [5]

Huchu's second novel, The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician , concerns a group of Zimbabweans living in Scotland, one of whom is secretly a spy. [4] Jeanne-Marie Jackson contends that Huchu tests the genre of globality with the structure of the novel, and by weaving together narration about the three friends in the book, he can let their lives contrast and disrupt each other. [6]

Huchu wrote "The Sale" for AfroSF, which was edited by Ivor Hartmann and the first published anthology of African speculative fiction. The story concerns a man protesting the sale of the Great Zimbabwe to China under a colonial regime where the US and China control reproduction and force men to take feminizing hormones. [4]

Huchu's Edinburgh Nights series is a set of five books about Ropa Moyo, a teenager who uses her ability to talk to ghosts to solve mysteries and eventually gets tangled in the magical rivalries between Scotland and England. [7] The series began with The Library of the Dead , a dark urban fantasy introducing Moyo as a 14-year old who passes messages between the living and the dead using a mbira to help her family pay rent. [8]

Huchu reflected that he would prefer to write in Shona but had received most of his literary education and exposure in English, making it so "your thinking is in English, not Shona; it's what the system was designed for." He says opportunities for writers in Shona are very limited, with the main publishing audience being school curricula, and only one literary journal accepting Shona fiction: Munyori. [4] For the Jalada language project, he translated a short story by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o into Shona. [4] [9]

Awards

YearWorkAwardCategoryResultRef
2014"The Intervention" Caine Prize Shortlisted [4]
2017"The Marriage Plot" Nommo Award Short StoryWon: tied with “Who Will Greet You at Home” by Lesley Nneka Arimah [10]
2019"Njuzu" Nommo Award Short StoryShortlisted [11]
2021"Corialis" Nommo Award Short StoryShortlisted [12]
2022 The Library of the Dead Nommo Award NovelWon [13]

Publications

Edinburgh Nights series

Standalone works

References

  1. 1 2 "Tendai Huchu". Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
  2. "Tendai Huchu". www.litencyc.com. Retrieved 17 March 2023.
  3. "Falling in love with a gay man in Harare". BBC News Online . Retrieved 7 March 2021.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Ryman, Geoff (1 March 2017). "Tendai Huchu". Strange Horizons. Retrieved 13 September 2025.
  5. "Tendai Huchu". African Books Collective. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
  6. Jackson, Jeanne-Marie (15 October 2021). "'Tendai Huchu's Maestro of Lonely Learning'—Read an excerpt from The African Novel of Ideas by Jeanne-Marie Jackson". The Johannesburg Review of Books. Retrieved 13 September 2025.
  7. Mondor, Colleen (13 March 2025). "The Legacy of Arniston House by T.L. Huchu: Review by Colleen Mondor". Locus Online. Retrieved 13 September 2025.
  8. Tivendale, James (19 January 2021). "REVIEW: The Library of the Dead by T.L. Huchu". Grimdark Magazine. Retrieved 13 September 2025.
  9. "Jalada Translation Issue 01: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o". Jalada Africa. 22 March 2016. Retrieved 13 September 2025.
  10. "2017 Nommo Awards Winners". Locus Online. 16 November 2017. Retrieved 13 September 2025.
  11. "2019 Nommo Awards Winners". Locus Online. 25 October 2019. Retrieved 13 September 2025.
  12. "2021 Nommo Awards Winners". Locus Online. 17 December 2021. Retrieved 13 September 2025.
  13. "2022 Nommo Awards Winners". Locus Online. 2 September 2022. Retrieved 13 September 2025.
  14. "Series". US Macmillan. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
  15. "Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments". Macmillan. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  16. "The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle by T. L. Huchu". www.panmacmillan.com. Retrieved 23 July 2023.
  17. "Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments". Macmillan Publishers. Retrieved 1 December 2024.