Zimbabwean
author Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize
The author is called “a chronicler and a conjurer
whose soaring imagination creates a Zimbabwean past made of anguish
and hope, of glory and despair”
For
immediate release
Contact:
SarahBelle Selig / sarahbelle@catalystpress.org
El Paso, TX, USA. March 29, 2022: This afternoon in a virtual
announcement, Mike Kelleher, Director of the Windham-Campbell Prize
at Yale University, named the recipients of the prestigious award.
Among the names was Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, a Zimbabwean author
whose interconnected novels—The
Theory of Flight (2021) and The History of Man (2022)—explore
colonialism in a Southern African country.
Both books
were originally published by Penguin Random House in South Africa,
then published to global audiences by Catalyst Press, an
independent publisher in the USA with a primary focus on books by
African authors.
First awarded in 2013, the Windham Campbell Prize, which is
described on the organization’s website as a “global
English-language award that calls attention to literary achievement
and provides writers with the opportunity to focus on their work
independent of financial concerns,” is one of literature’s most
prestigious awards. The Prize is administered by the Beinecke Rare
Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. Recipients are
chosen via a three-juror-per- category panel made up of experts in
their fields. Previous winners of the prize have included novelist
Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift; essayist Rebecca Solnit,
author of Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and
Essays); Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks; and essayist
Hilton Als, among many others. Catalyst Press founder and
publisher, Jessica Powers, is excited to see Ndlovu’s name among
those winners, “We are unbelievably proud of Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
and the honor she has received,” Powers says.
The award comes at a time of multiple successes for Ndlovu. Her
debut novel, The
Theory of Flight, received a starred review from
Publishers Weekly, as well as praise from Bustle, The Rupture, and
Full Stop Magazine. The South African release of the book was
awarded the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The History of Man,
was included on best-of lists from Buzzfeed and Brittle Paper, and
has been featured twice in the New York Times. The South African
release was shortlisted for a Sunday Times CNA Literary Award.
These books, and their reception, are exciting news for Catalyst,
says Powers. “This recognition not only elevates Siphiwe as an
individual writer, but all Southern African writers and the books
we publish at Catalyst Press.”
That more people will be exposed to Ndlovu’s work isn’t just
something that Catalyst is proud of; her fellow writers share this
joy as well. Award-winning writer Tsitsi Dangarembga, also a
Windham-Campbell recipient, sees the award as not only a win for
Ndlovu, but for the ZImbabwean literary community, “I am delighted
to see that Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a recipient of the Windham
Campbell Award for Fiction this year. This is an extraordinary
distinction, one that is particularly meaningful for Zimbabwean
literature at a time when political repression and economic
stagnation undermine artistic expression in the country.”
This sentiment is shared by fellow Zimbabwean author, Tsitsi Jaji:
“I am delighted to see Siphiwe's work being celebrated so widely.
She is so tender, and so just with her characters, a truly humane
writer.“ With the award, Ndlovu will continue working on other
books set within the world of The Theory of Flight and The History
of Man, “I cannot even begin to fully articulate all the amazing
things that this prize means for me at this stage in my career,”
Ndlovu says. “There are still so many stories waiting to be told
and now thanks to the Windham-Campbell Prizes at Yale, I will be
able to tell them. I am both immensely honored and deeply humbled
by this recognition."
With this award of $165,000, prize recipients are given the time to
create new works without financial constraints, which excites
Powers and others on the Catalyst staff. “We look forward to the
wonderful books Dr. Ndlovu will write in the future, partly as a
result of receiving this prize,” Powers says.
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About Catalyst Press
Catalyst Press was founded in 2017 as a literary spark, bringing
voices from around the globe to readers everywhere. We publish
books that reveal the world from different perspectives and
different understandings. Publishing literary fiction, graphic novels,
memoir, travel, crime fiction, science, and books for young
readers, our authors explore lives, stories, and places in ways
that make our global community feel more connected. Change can
happen in lots of ways, but we think it begins one page at a time.
About Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean filmmaker and scholar, as
well as the author of two critically acclaimed novels: The History
of Man and The Theory of Flight. The Theory of Flight, which won
the 2019 Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, fuses together a range of
histories and registers into a distinctive, moving, and provocative
whole. The novel tells the story of Genie, a visionary who flies in
both literal and metaphorical senses, and her father, a freedom
fighter and eccentric who is trying to build an airplane to bring
his Dolly Parton-lookalike wife to Nashville. A richly-textured
meditation on colonial history and civil war, The Theory of Flight
is also a magical realist novel of great wonder and a sweeping
multi-generational family saga. In her second novel, The History of
Man, Ndlovu continues to explore nationhood and personhood,
charting the violently destructive effects of settler-colonialism
on both. She is an artist who dares to imagine her own mysterious
realms, while never avoiding the devastating realities of the world
in which we live. Ndlovu holds a PhD in Modern Thought and
Literature from Stanford University, as well as master's degrees in
African Studies and Film from Ohio University. She has published
research on Saartjie Baartman and she wrote, directed, and edited
the award-winning short film Graffiti. She is a recipient of a 2018
Morland Writing Scholarship and of a 2020 Writing Fellowship at the
Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS). Her third novel,
The Quality of Mercy, which acts as a bridge between the first two
novels, will be published in September 2022 in South Africa and in
early 2023 in the United States.
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