Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga (born 4 February 1959) is a Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker.

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born on 4 February 1959 in Mutoko, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a small town where her parents taught at the nearby mission school.

Her mother, Susan Dangarembga, was the first black woman in Southern Rhodesia to obtain a bachelor's degree, and her father, Amon, would later become a school headmaster.

From the ages of two to six, Dangarembga lived in England, while her parents pursued higher education.

There, as she has recalled, she and her brother began to speak English "as a matter of course and forgot most of the Shona we had learnt."

She returned to Rhodesia with her family in 1965, the year of the colony's Unilateral Declaration of Independence.

In Rhodesia, she reacquired Shona, but considered English, the language of her schooling, her first language.

In 1965, she moved with her family to Old Mutare, a Methodist mission near Umtali (now Mutare) where her father and mother took up respective positions as headmaster and teacher at Hartzell High School.

Dangarembga, who had begun her education in England, enrolled at Hartzell Primary School, before going to board at the Marymount Mission convent school.

She completed her A-Levels at Arundel School, an elite, predominantly white girls' school in the capital, Salisbury (today Harare), and in 1977 went to the University of Cambridge to study medicine at Sidney Sussex College.

There, she experienced racism and isolation and left after three years, returning in 1980 to Zimbabwe several months before the country's independence.

Dangarembga worked briefly as a teacher, before taking up studies in medicine and psychology at the University of Zimbabwe while working for two years as a copywriter at a marketing agency.

She joined the university drama club, and wrote and directed several of the plays the group performed.

She also became involved with the theatre group Zambuko, during which she participated in the production of two plays, Katshaa! and Mavambo.

She later recalled, "There were simply no plays with roles for black women, or at least we didn't have access to them at the time. The writers in Zimbabwe were basically men at the time. And so I really didn't see that the situation would be remedied unless some women sat down and wrote something, so that's what I did!"

She wrote three plays during this period: Lost of the Soil (1983), She No Longer Weeps, and The Third One.

During these years, she also began reading works by African-American women writers and contemporary African literature, a shift from the English classics she had grown up reading.

In 1985, Dangarembga's short story "The Letter" won second place in a writing competition arranged by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and was published in Sweden in the anthology Whispering Land.

She wrote it in 1985, but experienced difficulties getting it published; rejected by four Zimbabwean publishers, she eventually found a willing publisher in the London-based Women's Press.

In 1987, her play She No Longer Weeps, which she wrote during her university years, was published in Harare.

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.

She has won other literary honours, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the PEN Pinter Prize.

Her first novel, Nervous Conditions, was published in 1988 in the United Kingdom, and a year later in the United States.

Nervous Conditions, the first novel written in English by a black woman from Zimbabwe, received domestic and international acclaim, and was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Africa region) in 1989.

In 1989, Dangarembga went to Germany to study film direction at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin.

She produced a number of films while in Berlin, including a documentary aired on German television.

She wrote the story for the film Neria, made in 1991, which became the highest-grossing film in Zimbabwean history.

Her work is included in the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

In 1992, she founded Nyerai Films, a production company based in Harare.

Her 1996 film Everyone's Child, the first feature film directed by a black Zimbabwean woman, was shown internationally, including at the Dublin International Film Festival.

The film, shot on location in Harare and Domboshava, follows the tragic stories of four siblings after their parents die of AIDS.

In 2000, Dangarembga moved back to Zimbabwe with her family, and continued her work with Nyerai Films.

In 2002, she founded the International Images Film Festival.

Her 2005 film Kare Kare Zvako won the Short Film Award and Golden Dhow at the Zanzibar International Film Festival, and the African Short Film Award at the Milan Film Festival.

Her 2006 film Peretera Maneta received the UNESCO Children's and Human Rights Award and won the Zanzibar International Film Festival.

She is the executive director of the organization Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe and the founding director of the International Images Film Festival for Women of Harare (IIFF).

As of 2010, she has also served on the board of the Zimbabwe College of Music for five years, including two years as chair.

Nervous Conditions is considered one of the best African novels ever written, and was included on the BBC's 2018 list of top 100 books that have shaped the world.

In 2020, her novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

In 2022, Dangarembga was convicted in a Zimbabwe court of inciting public violence, by displaying, on a public road, a placard asking for reform.