Yvonne Vera

Yvonne Vera (2003)

Yvonne Vera (born September 19, 1964 in Bulawayo , Rhodesia , † April 7, 2005 in Toronto , Canada) was a Zimbabwean writer .

education

Vera's parents were teachers. After attending Luveve and Mzilikazi Secondary School and graduating in Bulawayo, she first taught English at Njube High School in Bulawayo. There she met her future husband, a backpacker and teacher from Canada , whom she married in 1987. From 1986, she studied English literature , art history and film at York University in Toronto in Canada . She graduated from York University with BA , MA and Ph.D. in English (dissertation: The prison of the colonial area). In 1995 she returned to Zimbabwe, where she devoted herself entirely to writing.

Writing activity

The background of her books is the colonial Rhodesia and the guerrilla war of the Bantus . Her work deals with the vulnerability of people who have never really been able to plan and control their lives. It's about men who fearfully cling to what little they have, and women who dream that their children will get ahead. It is about self-realization in times of separation and death. The proximity of the guerrilla war allows them to take up traumatic and taboo topics: violence, robbery, incest, abortion, child abuse, patriarchy, preference for brothers. On the other hand, she juxtaposes the animated landscapes, ancestors, traditions of animism with the rationality of whites. With vital sensuality, she creates an African image of women that finally secures her place in women's literature.

Yvonne Vera was one of the most famous writers in Zimbabwe.

From 1995 to 1997 Yvonne Vera taught at the University of Bulawayo as a lecturer. From 1997 to 2003 she directed the National Gallery in Bulawayo. She left Zimbabwe at the end of 2004. She died of meningitis in Toronto at the age of 40 .

2019 Yvonne Vera was in the anthology New Daughters of Africa by Margaret Busby added.

Works

• Nehanda , TSAR Publications, Toronto 1995, ISBN 0920661416
  • German: Nehanda , translated by Maria von der Ahé, Coleba, Triesen 2000, ISBN 3293201369
• Without a Name , Baobab, Harare, Zimbabwe 1994, ISBN 0-908311-78-8
  • German: A woman without a name , translated by Hilde Schruff, Marino-Verlag, Munich 1997; Unions-Verlag, Zurich 1999, ISBN 3293201369
• Under the Tongue , Baobab Books, Harare 1996, ISBN 3293201369
• Why Don't You Carve Other Animals? LPC / InBook 1993 ISBN 0920661246
  • German: souls in exile. Stories , translated by Hilde Schruff, Lamuv, Göttingen 1997, ISBN 3-88977-471-7
• Butterfly Burning , Farrar Straus & Giroux 2000, ISBN 0374291861
  • German: Butterfly in Flames , translated by Thomas Brückner, Frederking and Thaler, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-89405-818-8
• The Stone Virgins , Weaver Press, Harare 2002, ISBN 1-77922-002-2
• A Voyeur's Paradise… Images of Africa , in: Encounter images in the meetings between Africa and Europe , Mai Palmberg (Ed.), Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Uppsala, Sweden 2001, ISBN 91-7106-478-8 , pp. 115–120

As editor

• Opening Spaces: An Anthology of Contemporary African Women's Writing , Yvonne Vera (Ed.), Heinemann, London 1999, ISBN 0-435-91010-8
• Black women: new literature from Africa , translated by Heike Brillmann-Ede, Yvonne Vera (ed.), Lamuv-Verlag, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-88977-613-2

Awards

• Main prizes of the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Association in 1994 and 1995
• Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region) 1997
• The Voice of Africa - Swedish Literary Award (1999)
• Adult Fiction Award - Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa (2002)
• Commonwealth Writers Prize (2002)
• LiBeraturpreis (2002) for Butterfly in Flames
• Premio Feronia (2003)
• Tucholsky Prize (Sweden) for the complete work (2004)

literature

• Angela Schader, Writing in No Man's Land. On the death of the Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera , in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung No. 84 of April 12, 2005, p. 44 (Swiss edition)
• Annemarie Rathke, Doris Lessing, Yvonne Vera: comparative views of Zimbabwe , (also dissertation at Bielefeld University) Winter Verlag, Anglistische Forschungen series, Heidelberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8253-5549-4

Web links

• Literature by and about Yvonne Vera in the catalog of the German National Library
• English studies from the University of Bremen on Yvonne Vera