"Abandon hope all ye who enter this profession" - it is a pity nobody told me these lines when I first put pen to paper and proclaimed in a boisterous voice that I was the rightful heir to Dostoevsky, Orwell, Hugo and every other literary giant on whose shoulders I would profess to stand whether I had read them or not.

“Poverty was screaming in my household, at one time I ended up thinking that poverty was mine,” narrates Sarah Matongo, one of the contributors to Narratives of Hope - 'It Starts Within Us', a new compilation of stories of survival, hope and change from some of the millions of Zimbabweans around the country who for the past decade "witnessed a social, economic and political crisis untold."

Poetry Bulawayo has released an anthology featuring the work of talented poets from Zimbabwe, Nigeria and South Africa. The poems were collected mainly through the organisation's monthly competitions which solicited poetry from all over the world. The anthology, titled Daybreak, is already available online through Unibook and comes at a time when poetry is enjoying a resurgence in Zimbabwe.

78 students from 17 schools in Harare attend the Zimbabwe International Book Fair's (ZIBF) Young Indaba workshop at the Crowne Plaza Monomotapa Hotel on July 28. The young literary artists were excited for the most part, to be a part of the event, but expressed their desire to have more platforms such as this to learn from industry gurus and brought forth a slew of recommendations for their older counterparts to implement.