Tsitsi Dangarembga launches her new essay collection, Black and Female, in an event run in partnership with English PEN.

Being categorised as black and female does not constrain my writing. Writing assures me that I am more than merely blackness and femaleness. Writing assures me I am – Tsitsi Dangarembga

This paradigm shifting collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of the acclaimed novelist’s complex relationship with race and gender.

At once philosophical, intimate, and urgent, Dangarembga’s landmark essays address the profound cultural and political questions that underpin her novels for the first time.

From her experience of life with a foster family in Dover and the difficulty of finding a publisher as a young Zimbabwean novelist, to the ways in which colonialism continues to disrupt the lives and minds of those subjugated by empire, Dangarembga writes to recentre marginalised voices.

Black and Female (Faber & Faber) offers a powerful vision toward ‘re-membering’, to use Toni Morrison’s word, those whose identities and experiences continue to be fractured by the intersections of history, race and gender.

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Photo/Illustration of Tsitsi Dangarembga By Kristian Hammerstad