Biography of Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959-)

Tsitsi Dangarembga

Born in 1959 in the town of Mutoko, Zimbabwe (which was Rhodesia at the time), Dangarembga moved to England as a girl and received her elementary education there. She returned to Zimbabwe at the age of six and re-learned her native language, Shona. In 1977, she returned to England to study medicine at Cambridge University.

Dangarembga returned to study psychology at the University of Zimbabwe in 1980, just before the country became independent.

She worked as a copywriter for two years, then began her career as a playwright. The most famous of her plays are The Lost of the Soil and the 1987 play She Does Not Weep. Her first short story, The Letter, was published in Sweden in 1985.

Nervous Conditions was her first novel, published in England in 1988, when Dangarembga was only twenty-five years old. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989, as the first novel to be published in English by a black Zimbabwean woman. The sequel, The Book of Not, was published in 2006.

Dangarembga also studied film direction at the Deutsche Film und Fernseh Akademie in Berlin, where she was involved in the production of various films, including Everyone's Child, the first feature film directed by a black Zimbabwean woman. She wrote the story for the highest-grossing film in the history of Zimbabwe, the 1993 film Neria.