Yvonne Vera was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe in 1964. She studied at York University, Toronto, Canada and published her first volume of short stories in 1992. Since then she published four numerously awarded novels, which have been translated into several languages, including Swedish, Danish and German. For her second novel »Without a Name« she received the Zimbabwe Book Publishers’ Award in 1995. »Under the Tongue« won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region). In 1999 she was given the Swedish literary award The Voice of Africa. »Opening Spaces: An Anthology of contemporary African Women’s Writing« edited by Yvonne Vera was published in the same year. Her last novel »Butterfly Burning« (1998) was translated into German in 2001. Yvonne Vera was the director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo. In 2005, she died in Toronto from meningitis.
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