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Chinodya wins 2007 Noma Award
The Standard (Zimbabwe)
October 28, 2007

ZIMBABWEAN writer, Shimmer Chinodya has won the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 2007 for his novel Strife.

"The brilliance of this powerful and haunting story, in notably innovative form, brings a new dimension to African writing," the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa Jury's citation reads. "The novelist reverses the traditional relationship between family and nation, concentrating on the social energies in an African family, rather than the individual or the nation.

"Powerful and haunting, with memorable portraits of individuals, the story is driven by a deep and distinctive sense of the tragic. The novelist's psychological sensitivity illuminates the dominant themes of disease and death; and the constant tension between the pull of the past and the aspiration of modernity is expressed in a prose that makes everything original and new, recasting old themes."

Chinodya has published eight novels, children's books, educational texts, radio and film scripts, and has contributed to numerous anthologies.

He has won many awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize
(Africa region). He seeks primarily to present an African worldview, but wants his literature to speak to the world as a whole. He describes his works as "experiments on the effects of time and change on humans, and human relationships tangled in the eternal quest for happiness and fulfilment".

The Noma Award, under the auspices of UNESCO, will be presented to Chinodya at a special ceremony details of which will be announced later.

Strife was published in 2006 by Weaver Press, Zimbabwe.

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