Internationally-acclaimed and award-winning novelist and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga has been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize for Fiction for her latest literary work, The Mournable Body.
The shortlist, which also includes Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, Maaza Mengiste, Douglas Stuart and Brandon Taylor, was revealed yesterday by The Booker Prizes.
“I am overwhelmed. And delighted. And grateful to everybody who has been there for me on this road”, Dangarembga reveled.
This Mournable Body, originally published in 2018, is the third book in a trilogy following the masterpiece ,Nervous Conditions (1988).
It centres on a fictitious character named Tambu who is in her late 30s and wonders who she has become, in spite of her “endearing” and “defiant” personality during her youthful years, as reviewed by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma in The Guardian.
The Booker Prizes said the novel illustrates “a woman confronting the realities of life and morality as she descends into poverty…coping with a post-colonial nightmare in Zimbabwe”.
Tsitsi Dangarembga was selected by the literary body from a longlist of 162 submissions. The literary award, which also carries a £50,000 prize, recognizes the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.
In 2018, her novel Nervous Conditions was listed among the top 100 books that shaped the world.
The prolific novelist attracted international attention when she was arrested on 31 July while peacefully protesting in Harare against corruption and the deteriorating political and economic situation in the country. She will appear in court on 18 September.
