NoViolet Bulawayo is the pen name of Elizabeth Zandile Tshele, an award-winning Zimbabwean author.
Bulawayo was born in Tsholotsho, Zimbabwe and attended Njube High School and Mzilikazi High School. She moved to the United States for higher education, starting at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, transferring to Texas A&M University for her bachelor's degree, and getting a master's degree in English from Southern Methodist University and a master's in Creative Writing from Cornell University.
Bulawayo's debut novel, We Need New Names, was released in 2013 to immediate critical acclaim. Among the honors she received for this work were the Etisalat Prize for Literature and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and she made the competitive 2013 fiction lists for the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Award's "5 Under 35," the Guardian First Book Award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award.
Bulawayo was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2012-2014 and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton from 2016-2017. She also teaches at Stanford University as the Jones Lecturer in Fiction.
NoViolet Bulawayo's Glory is a novel published in 2022. The novel was partially inspired by the rise and fall of Robert G. Mugabe, the now former (and deceased) President of Zimbabwe. Mugabe ruled Zimbabwe with an iron fist for nearly four decades...
We Need New Names is a coming-of-age story. A young girl named Darling lives in poverty in Zimbabwe following political unrest. She often steals guavas along with a group of other children, one of whom is pregnant, and is forced to attend church...
