THE Harare Book Club (HBC) — Zimbabwe’s largest book community — this week hosted an engaging book-swapping event at Afrotopia Café, situated within the iconic National Gallery of Zimbabwe.
The event brought together readers from different backgrounds and created a unique atmosphere for book lovers to network and socialise.
Since 2018, HBC has passionately championed literature and books by African and black authors.
Organisers took the opportunity to announce their 2025 calendar, starting with a virtual meet-the-author session with best-selling Zimbabwean author Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu on January 25.
The acclaimed novelist and filmmaker recently released The Creation of Half-Broken People, an epic tale about the lives of several women connected over generations through circumstances, tragedy and misremembering.
The book was published by Picador Africa from South Africa.
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“We have worked with her publisher Pan Macmillan South Africa to make this possible,” HBC founder Tonderai Mudambo told IndependentXtra.
Ndlovu is a filmmaker and academic, holding a PhD from Stanford University as well as a Master’s degree in African Studies and Film from Ohio University. She is the author of three novels, the bestselling The Theory of Flight, which won her the 2019 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. The book is currently a school set book in South Africa.
Its follow-up is The History of Man, where she explores decades of history through the eyes of one man on his journey from boyhood to manhood and the changes that befall him through love, loss and war.
In her latest offering titled The Quality of Mercy, the Bulawayo-born writer weaves together elements of social comedy and cosy crime.
Ndlovu’s work is published in South Africa and the United States and can also be read in Arabic and Italian translations.
She is a winner of Yale University’s 2022 Windham Campbell Prize and has published research on Saartjie Baartman (a Khoekhoe woman, who was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th Century Europe).
Ndlovu wrote, directed and edited the award-winning short film, Graffiti, which won the Silver Dhow at the Zanzibar International Film Festival in 2003.
“The club’s new year reading list will also kick off key collaborations with leading African publishing houses. We are excited to share that we are partnering with Cassava Republic of Nigeria and Jacana Media and Picador Africa (imprint of Pan Macmillan SA) from South Africa,” a statement released by HBC recently reads.
“Reading can be an isolating endeavour. By working closely with publishers, we aim to expose book lovers to engaging discourse with authors and literary advocates. Our community will, likewise, benefit from being introduced to a wider range of books crossing physical, imaginative, and thematic borders.”
From January until June, HBC will curate a selection of book readings that will tackle a wide array of issues such as challenged historical narratives, displacement and queer identities.
The books were written by several authors of African origin from Sierra Leone, Lesotho, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa and Zimbabwe.