Zimbabwean writers have done well again at this year’s Brittle Awards, snapping up four nominations in the recently-announced shortlist for the 2018 edition. There’s even a fifth nomination, in the name of one of our favourite adopted Zimbabwean authors.
The awards, launched last year, honour the best in online African writing. In the inaugural shortlist, Zimbabwe had three nominations.
This year, the Zimbabwean representatives on the shortlist and their respective categories are as follows:
The Brittle Paper Award for Creative Non-Fiction
Home Means Nothing to Me
By Tinashe Mushakavanhu in collaboration with Nontsikelelo Mutiti and Simba Mafundikwa
Published in Chimurenga
We’ve been watching the amazing work that Mushakavanhu and Mutiti have been doing with documenting Zimbabwean literature under their project, Reading Zimbabwe. The former is a writer and researcher with a passion for Zimbabwean literary history. The latter is an artist and arts educator. In 2015, the two started Black Chalk & Co., an initiative whose mission is to bring together writers, artists, designers, academics, and technologists “with a mutual interest in publishing, curating conversations and exhibitions, and facilitating teaching residencies.”
Mafundikwa, on the other hand, is a graphic designer, architect, fashionista and all-round creative talent. He studied architecture at the State University of New York at Delhi (SUNY). As a student, he received a number of scholarships and awards, including the Chancellor’s Award which is the highest honour bestowed upon a student in the SUNY system.
SUMMARY OF NOMINATED WORK:
“The life and movements of Dambudzo Marechera in Harare, between 1982 and 1987, on his return to Zimbabwe after forced exile in the United Kingdom, are documented in this excitingly innovative mapping project that speaks to the late great writer’s mythology and spirit as well as corrects misconceptions about his work and person.”
The Brittle Paper Award for Essays & Think Pieces
History Through the Body or Rights of Desire, Rights of Conquest
By Panashe Chigumadzi
Published in The Johannesburg Review of Books.
Chigumadzi recently became one of the most talked about writers in Zimbabwe after the release of her second book, ‘These Bones Will Rise Again‘ (Indigo Press). Her first book, ‘Sweet Medicine‘ (Blackbird Books, 2015) won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Transition Magazine, Chimurenga and The Washington Post, among other publications. She is the founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a website that helps to amplify the voices of young black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa. She is also a contributing editor to the Johannesburg Review of Books.
SUMMARY OF NOMINATED WORK:
“This mix of literary analysis, history, and memoir uses J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace as a point of both departure and arrival to reckon with race, gender, sex, land, and power in South African literature, politics, and everyday living. By finding links between geographical significances and Coetzee’s body of work, as well as by connecting the different Davids in works by Coetzee, Zoe Wicomb, and John Buchan, the racialized atmosphere of South Africa is broken up, and with it the dehumanization of the black female body by white males, and the black female’s consequent raw fear of white maleness.”
James Baldwin in Rhodesia
By Percy Zvomuya
Published in The Johannesburg Review of Books.
Zvomuya is a journalist, writer and self-proclaimed football fanatic. His writing has contributed to various publications, including Africaisacountry.com, Mail & Guardian and Chimurenga. In 2013 he was a recipient of the Miles Moreland Writing Scholarship.
SUMMARY OF NOMINATED WORK:
“Following a thread of intellectual relationships between African Americans and South Africans, an assessment of the influence exerted on James Baldwin by Michael Raeburn’s collection of stories Black Fire! Accounts of the Guerrilla War in Rhodesia (1978)—a book Baldwin blurbed, wrote its introduction and later reviewed. An analysis of ideas—views on violence, racial tension—reflected in both the book and Baldwin’s work.”
The Brittle Award for Poetry
On the Isle of Lesbos
By Tsitsi Jaji
Published in Harvard Review
Jaji is an associate professor of English and African & African American Studies at Duke University. She is currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center, and has previously held fellowships at the Schomburg Center (NEH), the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell (Mellon). Her book, Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity, received the African Literature Association’s First Book Award.
SUMMARY OF NOMINATED WORK:
“A haunting reflection on the Syrian refugee crises.”
And the half prize?
On Meeting Toni Morrison
By Sarah Ladipo Manyika
Published in Transition Magazine.
British-Nigerian writer, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, was nominated under the Creative Non-Fiction category for her piece on meeting one of the most famous writers of our time. Ladipo is married to a Zimbabwean and therefore qualifies as a full Zimbabwean herself, right? But in the interest of giving her Nigerian ancestry a chance, we’ll give them the other half. As this is an African award we’ll just quietly disregard her British heritage this once. Manyika is a literature professor. She has written two novels and many short stories and essays.
SUMMARY OF NOMINATED WORK:
“In the calm of her home, one of our leading novelists sits with one of history’s great storytellers and lets us, in beautiful prose un-sinking under the weight of awareness, into what can only be appreciated as a holy literary communion across generations.”
See the full list of nominations here. The winners will be announced on Monday, November 19, 2018.
