Petina Gappah

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Author Petina Gappah (2016)

Petina Gappah (born in Rhodesia in 1971 ) is a Zimbabwean author who writes in English .

Life

Petina Gappah grew up with their native language Shona and attended even before the establishment of Zimbabwe an English-language school in the segregation dominated Rhodesia . She studied law at the University of Zimbabwe and the University of Cambridge and received her doctorate from the University of Graz . Gappah worked as a lawyer for International Trade Law , and as a journalist in Geneva . Between 2010 and 2013 she lived in Harare with her son . From 2018 to 2019 she was an international trade advisor to the Zimbabwean government.

Despite her career as a lawyer, Gappah always wanted to be a writer. In 2009 she published a volume of short stories called An Elegy for Easterly , which was nominated for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Orwell Prize and received the Guardian First Book Award . The gallows humor that characterizes her works is already evident in these short stories.

In 2015, Faber & Faber Gappah's first novel The Book of Memory was published . In the form of a letter novel, it tells the story of the albino woman Memory, who is waiting to be executed on the death row of Chikurubi prison in Harare. There she writes her story for an American journalist.

In her novel Out of Darkness Radiant Light , published in 2019, Gappah describes the transport of David Livingstone's body from Central Africa to the seashore, 1,500 km away. The nine-month journey, which cost ten of the 69 expedition members their lives, is told from the perspective of cook Halima and Jacob Wainwright, who comes from Africa. Gappah worked on the novel for more than 20 years and completed it in 2017 as a guest of the DAAD artist program in Berlin.

Works

  • Contribution in: Trudy Hartzenberg (Ed.): The Role of the Advisory Center on WTO Law in Assisting African Countries in WTO Dispute Settlement , London: Cameron May, 2008.
  • To Elegy for Easterly. Stories . New York: Faber & Faber, 2009.
  • The Book of Memory . New York: Faber & Faber, 2015.
  • Rotten Row . New York: Faber & Faber, 2017.
  • Out of Darkness, Shining Light. New York: Scribner, 2019

In German translation

  • The colors of the moth. German by Patricia Klobusiczky, Arche Verlag, Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-7160-2750-9
  • The culprits of Rotten Row . German by Patricia Klobusiczky, Arche Verlag, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-7160-2763-9
  • Light shining out of the darkness. German by Anette Grube, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2019, ISBN 978-3-1039-7449-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Claire Armitstead: Petina Gappah interview: 'I've written a very Zimbabwean story - we keep a lot of family secrets' , in: The Guardian , September 5, 2015
  2. ↑ Petina Gappah , at Faber & Faber
  3. ↑ Petina Gappah, author, Vita. In: fischerverlage.de. S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, accessed on December 11, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Petina Gappah [Simbambwe, Switzerland]. In: international literature festival berlin (ilb). Retrieved December 11, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Cathrine Taylor: Facing death, bursting with life , review, in: Financial Times , August 29, 2015, p. 9
  6. ↑ Ulrike Baureithel: Mnemosyne, write! In: Der Tagesspiegel. August 29, 2016, accessed December 11, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Petina Gappah: "Out of the darkness shining light" - polyphonic self-talk about African history. In: deutschlandfunkkultur.de. Deutschlandradio, September 5, 2019, accessed on December 10, 2019 (German).
  8. ↑ Susanne Mayer: "Out of the darkness shining light": The sick heart . In: The time . December 5, 2019, ISSN  0044-2070 ( online [accessed December 11, 2019]).
personal data
SURNAME Gappah, Petina
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Zimbabwean author
DATE OF BIRTH 1971
PLACE OF BIRTH Rhodesia