Yvonne Vera

Novelist

(1964 – 2005) · Southern Africa

Zimbabwean novelist whose lyrical and often disturbing fiction addressed silence, violence, and the interior lives of Zimbabwean women. Her 1994 novel Nehanda drew on the life of the spirit medium who led the First Chimurenga uprising against British colonisation. She received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa and died in Toronto at forty in 2005.