Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in Rhodesia (what is now Zimbabwe), but spent several years of her childhood in England. She returned to Rhodesia at age six. She graduated from a missionary high school in Umtale and then returned to England to attend Cambridge. She studied medicine there but left in 1979 to return to Rhodesia, only a few months before the country declared its independence and became Zimbabwe. After that, she studied psychology at the University of Zimbabwe and did copywriting work for a marketing agency. During this time, she began writing plays and joined a local theater group. She began to publish short stories and plays that attracted positive attention in the mid-1980s, which culminated in Nervous Conditions in 1988. The novel won the African selection of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989. Despite her success, Dangarembga abandoned writing novels for almost two decades, and, during that time, studied film in Berlin and made several films that have been shown at prestigious international film festivals. She finished the second installment of Tambu's story in 2006 and completed the planned trilogy in 2018, more than 30 years after she began writing about Tambu.