Zimbabwean-born novelist and essayist, Panashe Chigumadzi, was last week named the winner of the 2018 Brittle Award for Essays & Think Pieces.
Chigumadzi impressed the judges with her essay, ‘History Through the Body or Rights of Desire, Rights of Conquest,’ which was published in the Johannesburg Review of Books.
Here’s what they had to say about her work; “Chigumadzi uses literary analysis, history, and memoir to interrogate J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, reckoning with race, gender, sex, land, and power in South African literature, politics, and everyday living, and the ways in which the novel is suspect in handling those. By finding links between geographical significances and Coetzee’s body of work— even 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. It is a timely work that leaves us pondering power and privilege.”
The Johannesburg Review of Books is a new publication that created a new online space for African writing, critiques and analyses.
The awards were started by the online African literary website, The Brittle Paper, in 2017 as a way of “recognizing the finest, original pieces of literature by Africans available online for free. There is US$1,100 in prize money, spread across five categories: the Brittle Paper Award for Fiction ($200), the Brittle Paper Award for Poetry ($200), the Brittle Paper Award for Creative Nonfiction ($200), the Brittle Paper Award for Essays & Think Pieces ($200), and the Brittle Paper Anniversary Award ($300) for writing published on our blog.
Zimbabwean writers were nominated for four awards this year.
Winners in other categories are Sibongile Fisher (Creative Non-Fiction), Itiola Jones (Poetry), Stacy Hardy (Fiction)and Shailja Patel (Anniversary Award).
Chigumadzi is currently a PhD student at Harvard University, in the Department of African and African American Studies. She is the author of two books, ‘Sweet Medicine’ (2015) and ‘These Bones Will Rise Again’ (2018). The former won the K Sello Duiker Literary Prize in 2016.
