Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga is the internationally acclaimed author of three novels: Nervous Conditions, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; This Mournable Body, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and The Book of Not. She won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2021 and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Dangarembga is also a filmmaker, playwright, and the director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust.

Being categorised as black and female does not constrain my writing. Writing assures me that I am more than merely blackness and femaleness. Writing assures me I am.

This paradigm shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s complex relationship with race and gender.

At once philosophical, intimate and urgent, Dangarembga’s landmark essays address the profound cultural and political questions that underpin her novels for the first time.

From her experience of life with a foster family in Dover and the difficulty of finding a publisher as a young Zimbabwean novelist, to the ways in which colonialism continues to disrupt the lives and minds of those subjugated by empire, Dangarembga writes to recenter marginalised voices.

Black and Female offers a powerful vision toward re-membering – to use Toni Morrison’s word – those whose identities and experiences continue to be fractured by the intersections of history, race and gender.