Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. She spent part of her childhood with a foster family in England, where she studied Medicine in Cambridge, after which she studied Psychology in Harare, and Cinema in Berlin, in a rich academic career that has marked her cultural production. She is a writer, filmmaker, and her internationally acclaimed, prize-winning books capture the heterogeneous social reality of the African continent, while also pondering the ways in which colonialism has marked personal experience and writing. Regarded as the best African writer of her generation, she has received such prestigious prizes as the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Frankfurt Book Fair, 2021), the PEN Printer Prize (2021), and the Yale University Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction (2022). Notable among her books are the essay Black and Female (2022 – in Spanish, Mujer y negra, Plankton Press, 2024) and the semiautobiographical trilogy opening with Nervous Conditions 1988 – in Catalan, Neguit permanent, L’Agulla Daurada, 2023), with which she became known as a writer. In 2021, she published the third and final part, This Mournable Body (Faber & Faber), a finalist for the Booker Prize, which is soon to appear in Catalan. In the domain of cinema, she has participated in the films Neria (1993) and Everyone’s Child (1996), both considered to be landmarks in the history of Zimbabwean cinema. She is also founder of International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF) and is head of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust (ICAPA) and of the audiovisual production company Nyerai Films.