Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe)

Born in Mutoko, Zimbabwe, Tsitsi Dangarembga completed her education in her home country. Dangarembga became interested in the arts at an early age and began writing and directing plays at school. She continued to write poetry and drama and to perform on stage throughout her studies in medicine at the University of Cambridge and in psychology at the University of Zimbabwe . In 1989, Dangarembga enrolled at the German Film and Television Academy, Berlin from which she graduated seven years later with distinction. In 2000, she returned to Zimbabwe with her husband and children to work full time at her production company, Nyerai Films. Nyerai Films has produced several documentaries distributed by The Cinema Guild. Her feature film work includes credits on most of Zimbabwe 's features, including Neria, More Time, Flame and Everyone's Child which she co-wrote and directed.

Dangarembga is the author of several plays, as well as of the internationally acclaimed novel Nervous Conditions, which she wrote at the age of 25. Nervous Conditions, her debut, was immediately recognized as a seminal piece of literature and was hailed by Doris Lessing as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. At the time t he American novelist, Alice Walker, wrote: “I'm delighted to recommend this remarkable novelist…One feels that her voice – cool, sardonic, wise – is not simply that of a contemporary African woman, but of an ancient one…A voice that says, with nary a genuflection in any direction, that if Africa is to survive, it must transform itself from the heath outward.”

The novel has been translated into twelve languages and has received the Commonwealth and Scandinavian prizes for literature. A vibrant personality, Dangarembga is particularly concerned with training in her sphere of work, specifically training for those who might not have such opportunities. She has been honoured with the prestigious Martin Luther King Fellowship by MIT, and the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship by the Civitella Ranieri Foundation based in New York and Italy . Today she continues to live with her family in Zimbabwe where she puts her energies into writing prose, teaching and directing, developing the local film industry, and directing the International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF), the women's film festival in Harare, which she founded in 2002. Her much-anticipated second novel The Book of Not was released in August 2006 by Ayebia Publishing in London and has received wonderful reviews. The novel traces Tambu's, Nervous Conditions protagonist, continuing quest to redefine the personal, political and historical forces that threaten to destroy the fabric of her community - and reveals how its aftermath still bedevils Africans today. A distinguishing feature of The Book of Not is its radical positioning in underscoring the paradoxes and complexities in the transition from colonialism to globalisation. Tambu's search for self-knowledge reveals that the process of decolonisation might have started; but it is far from finished. This is Dangarembga's second visit to Time of the Writer.

Bibliography

The Book of Not, (novel), Ayebia Publishing, London, 2006
In A Voyage Around (selected poems), Haus de Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 1990
Nervous Conditions, (novel), The Women's Press, London, 1988
She No Longer Weeps, (play), The College Press, Harare, 1987