The African Giant Tsitsi Dangarembga Wins PEN Pinter Prize. The talented writer in the field of Literature and Arts has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, praised for her “ability to capture and communicate vital truths even amidst times of upheaval”. The win means she will deliver a keynote address at a ceremony hosted by British Library and English PEN on Monday 11 October 2021.
The PEN Pinter Prize was established in 2009 in memory of Nobel-laureate playwright Harold Pinter. It goes to a writer of “outstanding literary merit” who, as Pinter put it in his Nobel speech, shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.
“This Mournable Body” author Dangarembga later commented by saying, “I am grateful that my casting – in the words of Harold Pinter – an “unflinching, unswerving gaze” upon my country and its society has resonated with many people across the globe and this year with the jury of the PEN Pinter Prize 2021. I believe that the positive reception of literary works like mine helps to prove that we can unite around that which is positively human”.
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Tsitsi Dangarembga stepped into the international limelight in 1988 with her debut novel Nervous Conditions. The novel is a coming-of-age story about a girl’s battle to escape poverty and get an education in the previous Rhodesia, before the country gained its independence from Britain in 1980. It won the 1989 Commonwealth Book Prize for fiction and in 2018, it was named by the BBC as one of 100 stories that shaped the world. Tsitsi’s novel has been widely praised for its insight into the lives of women in Africa and its themes of colonialism, sexism, and racism.
It was also the first book published in English by a Black Zimbabwean woman and she was just 25 years old. The book was followed by The Book of Not, about Tambu’s teenage years, and the Booker-shortlisted “This Mournable Body”, the third part of the trilogy, set in the postcolonial Zimbabwe of the 1990s.
Tsitsi Dangarembga, African Giant, PEN Pinter Prize winner is a mother of three who currently lives in Harare, Zimbabwe. Her story is an inspiration to many and other talented Africans on the continent, waiting for their immense contribution to the world to come to the limelight.
