Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma was born in Zimbabwe in 1988 and grew up there and in South Africa. She studied Creative Writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first independent publication was »Shadows« (2013), a volume with a narrative and several short stories about everyday life in Zimbabwe and life as a foreigner in Johannesburg. This was followed by her first novel, »House of Stone« (2018). The novel begins amidst the unrest of modern Zimbabwe. Bukhosi, the son of Abednego and Agnes Mlambo, has been missing for some time. To find him again, the parents hope for help from their enigmatic lodger: 24-year-old Zamani, for his part, is trying to establish himself as a replacement for his missing son. Based on the life story of Abednego and Agnes, the author delves deep into the history of her home country. What drives Zamani is only gradually revealed – told with dark humor and many unexpected twists. According to the »Guardian«, »Tshuma is incapable of writing a boring sentence: she inhabits her narration so totally that even the most absurd and silly actions become believable«. The novel won the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction and was shortlisted for numerous international prizes. The protagonist of Tshuma’s second novel »Digging Stars« (2023) is Rosa, who is accepted into an elite interdisciplinary program to explore the cosmos. Her father was an astronomer and brought together Western and indigenous scientific thinking in a pioneering way. Since his death, Rosa has been plagued by panic attacks; unresolved questions about his life haunt her. Now she meets a group of talented scholars who challenge her understanding of identity, the ethics of technology and even Rosa’s reverence for her father… The novel won the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Award.

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma currently teaches creative writing at Emerson College in Boston, where she lives.

Status: April 2024

Shadows
Kwela Books
Kapstadt, 2013

House of Stone
Atlantic Books
London, 2018

German Translation:
Haus aus Stein
Interkontinental
Berlin, 2023
(Ü: Simone Jakob)

Digging Stars
W. W. Norton
New York City, 2023