Jack Mapanje

Fiona Johnson Chalamanda (University of Stirling)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 8.2.3: Anglophone African Writing and Culture: Subsaharan.
Vol. editors: Helen Rachel Cousins (Birmingham Newman University), David Firth (University of Manchester), Alex Nelungo Wanjala (University of Nairobi)

Dates

Born 1945
Activity 1965-ongoing

Places

Born in Malawi
Active in Malawi; United Kingdom

Activities

Primary

Poet

Resources

Mapanje's Works

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Jack Mapanje was born to a Yao family in Mangochi, Malawi in 1945. He was educated at the University of Malawi, where he gained his BA and subsequently taught. During his years at the University, he co-founded and contributed to the Writer's Workshop, a significant forum that nurtured original Malawian creative writing, and which had, as an underlying subtext, the conditions of writing in Hastings Kamuzu Banda's Malawi, with its machinery of surveillance and censorship. While completing a PhD in Linguistics at the University of London, Mapanje had his first volume of poems

Of Chameleons and Gods

(1981), published by Heinemann. This book, written in the satirical, proverbial style of the “praise poet” of the region's oral culture, was withdrawn from circulation in Malawi in 1985 for…

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306 words

Citation: Chalamanda, Fiona Johnson. "Jack Mapanje". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 January 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2927, accessed 23 November 2024.]