Tsitsi Dangarembga
Born in Mutoko, Zimbabwe, playwright, poet, activist and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga completed her education in her home country, where she worked as a copywriter and started writing seriously as a poet and playwright. Dangarembga wrote her first novel Nervous Conditions at the age of twenty-five. It immediately became a seminal piece of literature and was hailed by Doris Lessing as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. She published her second novel The Book of Not in 2006 and its successor A Mournable Boy is forthcoming.
She obtained her Masters in Filmmaking from the German Film and Television Academy Berlin. She lives in Harare where she founded the production house Nyerai Films and the International Images Film Festival for Women. She also founded the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa where she works as director. Her films and literature have been critically acclaimed and have received international awards. She founded her publishing house, ICAPA Publishing, last year with a collection of short stories A Family Portrait that interrogate the many endemic forms of violence in Zimbabwe. Her contribution to the collection is a short story called The Brick. She is currently writing Sai-Sai, Watermaker a dystopic speculative fiction for young adults.