Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu was born in 1977 in the city of Bulawayo in what is now Zimbabwe (during its colonial period, it was called Southern Rhodesia and, at points, Rhodesia). Due to political violence in the lead-up to Zimbabwe’s 1980 independence, Ndlovu’s family fled to Sweden when she was very young and then moved to the U.S. After Zimbabwe’s independence, they returned, and Ndlovu lived there until leaving to attend Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her BFA from Emerson in 2000. She later earned an MFA in Film Studies from Ohio University, an MA in African Studies from Ohio University, and a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. In 2003, a short film she directed, “Graffiti,” won a Silver Dhow at the Zanzibar International Film Festival, an important festival held annually in Tanzania since 1997. In the mid-2010s she left the U.S.; she has since lived in both Zimbabwe and South Africa. In 2018, she published her first novel, The Theory of Flight, for which she won South Africa’s Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The History of Man (2020), continues the stories of characters introduced in her first novel; she has plans to write four novels in this series.