Novelist, playwright, cultural activist and prize-winning filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga studied psychology at the University of Zimbabwe. She obtained her MA in Directing at the German Film and
Television Academy Berlin. She is known for her trilogy of novels set in her home country – Nervous Conditions (1988), The Book of Not (2006), the 2020 Booker Prize nominated novel This Mournable Body (2018) – and her collection of essays Black and Female (2022).
Selected literary awards includes English Pen’s Pinter Prize (2021), The German Peace Prize (2021), Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize (2022), the Pen Catalan Free Voice Award (2023) and the Alice and Clifford Spendlove Prize in Social Justice, Diplomacy and Tolerance (2024). She received the D. Litt (h.c. Rhodes) in 2025.
In 2009 Dangarembga founded the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust in Harare, Zimbabwe. The NGO runs a diverse programme of projects, including an international women’s film festival, and is currently fundraising for a six year pan-African Film development programme, Creative Africa Storytelling for the Screen Incubator (CASSI). CASSI’s goal is to create a
critical mass of globally competitive film practitioners in Africa, in order to elevate Africa’s capacity, earnings and ownership in the growing global film economy.
Amongst other prestigious residencies, Dangarembga is a former fellow of the Rockefeller Bellagio Centre (2016), the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (2021) and the Radcliffe Institute,
Harvard University (2022-23). She was the 2021-22 International Chair in Creative Writing (Africa) at the University of East Anglia, organising literary training and production events in five African countries, with an output of three publications. An Honorary Fellow of her alma mater Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where she interrupted her studies to return to Zimbabwe on the eve of Zimbabwe’s independence from Great Britain, she has taught and spoken at leading African, European and American universities and insitutions, including most recently Stanford University, the
Centre for Contemporary Culture Barcelona, and Augsburg University where she was a Guest lecturer in the Jakob Fugger Centre, with a lecture series entitled ‘21st Century Solutions from No Man’s Land: A Framework for a More Sustainable Planet from Ancient Africa’.
Dangarembga is currently developing a slate of long fiction films and is working on her next fiction and nonfiction books.
