Spring 2020

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of the novel House of Stone, winner of the 2019 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place and the 2019 Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction, shortlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her work was described by The Guardian as a narration not only of "Zimbabwean history, but also all of African colonial history," and by The New York Times as a "radical retelling of the past" that "is a sublime performance of narrative possibilities."

She has been invited to give public lectures about House of Stone at Oxford University, the Nordic Africa Institute, and Vassar College. In 2017, she received the Rockefeller Foundation’s prestigious Bellagio Center Literary Arts Residency Award for her work.

Her collection, Shadows, was published by Kwela in South Africa to critical acclaim and won the 2014 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is a native of Zimbabwe and has lived in South Africa and the United States.

Novuyo’s writing has been featured in numerous anthologies, most recently McSweeney’s, The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, and Ploughshares edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board and is an editor at The Bare Life Review, a journal of refugee and immigrant literature in based in California.