NoViolet Bulawayo

1981–

Zimbabwean novelist, born Elizabeth Zandile Tshele, whose fiction examines exile, migration and political power in post-independence Zimbabwe. She moved to Michigan at eighteen and studied English at Texas A&M University-Commerce and Southern Methodist University before taking an MFA at Cornell University. Her story Hitting Budapest won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her debut novel, We Need New Names (2013), follows a girl who leaves a Zimbabwean shantytown for the United States; it won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Glory (2022), a political fable with animal characters, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.

Timeline of NoViolet Bulawayo’s life

Works

Prizes