Zimbabwean author Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize
The author is called “a chronicler and a conjurer whose soaring imagination creates a Zimbabwean past made of anguish and hope, of glory and despair”
For immediate release
Contact: SarahBelle Selig / sarahbelle@catalystpress.org
El Paso, TX, USA. March 29, 2022: This afternoon in a virtual announcement, Mike Kelleher, Director of the Windham-Campbell Prize at Yale University, named the recipients of the prestigious award. Among the names was Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, a Zimbabwean author whose interconnected novels—The Theory of Flight (2021) and The History of Man (2022)—explore colonialism in a Southern African country.
Both books were originally published by Penguin Random House in South Africa, then published to global audiences by Catalyst Press, an independent publisher in the USA with a primary focus on books by African authors.
First awarded in 2013, the Windham Campbell Prize, which is described on the organization’s website as a “global English-language award that calls attention to literary achievement and provides writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns,” is one of literature’s most prestigious awards. The Prize is administered by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. Recipients are chosen via a three-juror-per- category panel made up of experts in their fields. Previous winners of the prize have included novelist Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift; essayist Rebecca Solnit, author of Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays); Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks; and essayist Hilton Als, among many others. Catalyst Press founder and publisher, Jessica Powers, is excited to see Ndlovu’s name among those winners, “We are unbelievably proud of Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu and the honor she has received,” Powers says.
The award comes at a time of multiple successes for Ndlovu. Her debut novel, The Theory of Flight, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, as well as praise from Bustle, The Rupture, and Full Stop Magazine. The South African release of the book was awarded the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The History of Man, was included on best-of lists from Buzzfeed and Brittle Paper, and has been featured twice in the New York Times. The South African release was shortlisted for a Sunday Times CNA Literary Award. These books, and their reception, are exciting news for Catalyst, says Powers. “This recognition not only elevates Siphiwe as an individual writer, but all Southern African writers and the books we publish at Catalyst Press.”
That more people will be exposed to Ndlovu’s work isn’t just something that Catalyst is proud of; her fellow writers share this joy as well. Award-winning writer Tsitsi Dangarembga, also a Windham-Campbell recipient, sees the award as not only a win for Ndlovu, but for the ZImbabwean literary community, “I am delighted to see that Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a recipient of the Windham Campbell Award for Fiction this year. This is an extraordinary distinction, one that is particularly meaningful for Zimbabwean literature at a time when political repression and economic stagnation undermine artistic expression in the country.”
This sentiment is shared by fellow Zimbabwean author, Tsitsi Jaji: “I am delighted to see Siphiwe's work being celebrated so widely. She is so tender, and so just with her characters, a truly humane writer.“ With the award, Ndlovu will continue working on other books set within the world of The Theory of Flight and The History of Man, “I cannot even begin to fully articulate all the amazing things that this prize means for me at this stage in my career,” Ndlovu says. “There are still so many stories waiting to be told and now thanks to the Windham-Campbell Prizes at Yale, I will be able to tell them. I am both immensely honored and deeply humbled by this recognition."
With this award of $165,000, prize recipients are given the time to create new works without financial constraints, which excites Powers and others on the Catalyst staff. “We look forward to the wonderful books Dr. Ndlovu will write in the future, partly as a result of receiving this prize,” Powers says.
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About Catalyst Press
Catalyst Press was founded in 2017 as a literary spark, bringing voices from around the globe to readers everywhere. We publish books that reveal the world from different perspectives and different understandings. Publishing literary fiction, graphic novels, memoir, travel, crime fiction, science, and books for young readers, our authors explore lives, stories, and places in ways that make our global community feel more connected. Change can happen in lots of ways, but we think it begins one page at a time.
About Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean filmmaker and scholar, as well as the author of two critically acclaimed novels: The History of Man and The Theory of Flight. The Theory of Flight, which won the 2019 Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, fuses together a range of histories and registers into a distinctive, moving, and provocative whole. The novel tells the story of Genie, a visionary who flies in both literal and metaphorical senses, and her father, a freedom fighter and eccentric who is trying to build an airplane to bring his Dolly Parton-lookalike wife to Nashville. A richly-textured meditation on colonial history and civil war, The Theory of Flight is also a magical realist novel of great wonder and a sweeping multi-generational family saga. In her second novel, The History of Man, Ndlovu continues to explore nationhood and personhood, charting the violently destructive effects of settler-colonialism on both. She is an artist who dares to imagine her own mysterious realms, while never avoiding the devastating realities of the world in which we live. Ndlovu holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, as well as master's degrees in African Studies and Film from Ohio University. She has published research on Saartjie Baartman and she wrote, directed, and edited the award-winning short film Graffiti. She is a recipient of a 2018 Morland Writing Scholarship and of a 2020 Writing Fellowship at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS). Her third novel, The Quality of Mercy, which acts as a bridge between the first two novels, will be published in September 2022 in South Africa and in early 2023 in the United States.
