Shimmer Chinodya

Ranka Primorac (University of Southampton)

Ed. by John Thieme, University of East Anglia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 7.2.3.03: South Africa and other Southern Writing and Culture.
Vol. editors: Helen Rachel Cousins (Birmingham Newman University), David Firth (University of Manchester)

Dates

Born 1957
Activity 1973-ongoing

Places

Born in Zimbabwe
Active in Zimbabwe

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

Chinodya's Works

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Shimmer Chinodya was born in a township (black ghetto) in Gweru, in the Midlands area of Zimbabwe (Gwelo, Rhodesia at the time). He spent the first eight years of his life there; then – in 1965, the year Rhodesia's Prime Minister Ian Smith declared unilaterally independence from Britain – his parents built a second home in a village in the north-west of the country. Chinodya's mother made her home there with his sisters, his father remained in town, and Chinodya and his brothers alternated between the two and boarding school. In 1976, at the height of guerrilla struggle for majority rule, Chinodya was a boarding student at Goromonzi, an elite government high school for Africans near the capital. (He edited and contributed to the school magazine there; his first publication was a…

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1179 words

Citation: Primorac, Ranka. "Shimmer Chinodya". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 March 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=863, accessed 21 November 2024.]