Zimbabwean novelist, Tsitsi Dangarembga has won this year’s global Windham- Campbell price worth $165,000 grants, as the award marks its 10th anniversary.
The award, which is one of the world’s richest for the past decade has celebrated eight writers each year for their achievements in fiction, non fiction, poetry and drama. The large grants given to winners are intended “to support their writing and allow them to focus on their work independent of financial concerns”.
PEN Pinter prizewinning Dangarembga’s debut novel Nervous Conditions was the first book to be published in English by a black woman in Zimbabwe. In September 2020 the writer-cum-activist’s novel, This Mournable Body was longlisted for the Booker prize in the same week she was arrested during peaceful anti-corruption protests in Harare.
When she found out that the judges – who remain anonymous throughout the process – had chosen her for the Windham-Campbell prize, Dangarembga admitted she had been waiting for this news all of her life, “not always believing but constantly hoping”.
She said: “I desperately needed this award, as a writer working on the African continent. Few countries support creativity or the arts in a meaningful manner. Zimbabwe is amongst those that do so least.”
“Now I will at last be able to slow down and breathe and contemplate my universe, allowing me do the work I want to do in the way I want to do it,” she added. “So basically the award is life giving.”
British writer Pinnock, the first black woman to have a play staged at the National Theatre, wins her prize for an outstanding contribution to global theatre. The prize has described her plays, which include Leave Taking and Rockets and Blue Lights, as being “committed to taking formal risks and to asking difficult questions about the role of art in shaping cultures and institutions”. Like Dangarembga, Pinnock expressed excitement for the “freedom” that the prize money will afford her, allowing her to “experiment” and “work on projects in a non-pressured way”.
