BIO

Panashe Chigumadzi is an award-winning writer, scholar, and cultural historian writing across gender, geography and generation in her exploration of themes ranging from race, religion and spirituality, to African Philosophy and Cosmology, Black Consciousness, Black Feminism, Black Internationalism and Pan-Africanism, to the afterlives of settler colonialism, Transatlantic Slavery, global (anti-)Blackness, and the indignity of Black life under crippling poverty and violence. Chigumadzi is the author of These Bones Will Rise Again  (2018), a historical memoir reflecting on Robert Mugabe's military ouster through the spirits of anti-colonial heroine Mbuya Nehanda and her grandmother Mbuya Chigumadzi, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Prize for Non-fiction. Her 2015 debut novel Sweet Medicine won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. Chigumadzi was the founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform for black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa. A columnist for The New York Times, and contributing editor of the Johannesburg Review of Books, her work has featured in titles including The Guardian, The Washington Post, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Die Ziet, Chimurenga, The Sunday Times, City Press, Africa is A Country, and Transition. As a member of the African Feminist Initiative, she contributed has essays to landmark Afro-feminist anthologies such as Margaret Busby’s New Daughters of Africa: International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent (2019) and Gabeba Baderoon and Desiree Lewis’ award-winning Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa (2021).

Chigumadzi has delivered distinguished lectures including the 2023 ZAM Nelson Mandela Lecture at the Amsterdam International Theatre and the 2015 Ruth First Lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand Great Hall. In 2016, Chigumadzi was the inaugural curator of Soweto’s Abantu Book Festival, South Africa’s most important gathering for black readers and writers. 

Chigumadzi is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s Departments of African and African American Studies and History, and holds a masters degree in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand.

She is the 2022-2023 Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research. She has also held the Ruth First Fellowship and Iowa International Writers Fellowship.

Photo: Rachel Corner