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) and the Pen Catalan Free Voice Award (2023).
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, the 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 boost Africa’s earnings and ownership in the growing global film economy.
Amongst other prestigious residencies, Dangarembga is a former fellow of the Rockefeller Bellagio Centre (2016) and the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2022-23). In 2021-22 she inaugurated the International Chair in Creative Writing (Africa) at the University of East Anglia. She has taught and spoken at leading African, European and American universities.
Dangarembga is currently working on forthcoming fiction and non-fiction literary projects. She has a slate of long fiction films in development through ICAPA Trust's Equal Voices Story and Script Development Workshop series, which was launched in 2017.
