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Shimmer Chinodya Biography

(1957– ), Dew in the Morning, Farai's Girls, Harvest of Thorns, New Writing in Rhodesia



Zimbabwean novelist, born in Gweru, educated at the University of Zimbabwe and at the University of Iowa. He became editor-in-chief of the Curriculum Development Unit at the Zimbabwean Ministry of Education. Under the name ‘B. S. Chiraska’ he is the author of a number of educational textbooks and stories for children. Dew in the Morning (1982), his first novel, projects an affirmative view of post-Independence Zimbabwe through the understated lyricism with which it treats the human and natural aspects of its rural setting. The psychologically acute Farai's Girls (1984) investigates the nature of human relations through the chief protagonist's liaisons with a succession of girlfriends. In Harvest of Thorns (1989), the passage from adolescence to adulthood is dramatically projected in the narrative of growth to maturity against the background of the Zimbabwean War of Liberation. Chinodya is represented as a poet in T. O. McLoughlin's edition of New Writing in Rhodesia (1976).



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Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern FictionEncyclopedia of Literature: Cheltenham Gloucestershire to Cockermouth Cumbria