15 Facts About Zukiswa Wanner

Zukiswa Wanner was born on 1976 and is a South African journalist, novelist and editor born in Zambia and now based in Kenya.

In 2014, Wanner was named on the Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature.

In 2020, Zukiswa Wanner was awarded the Goethe Medal alongside Ian McEwan and Elvira Espejo Ayca, making Zukiswa Wanner the first African woman to win the award.

Zukiswa Wanner was born in 1976 in Lusaka, Zambia, to a South African father and a Zimbabwean mother.

Zukiswa Wanner went on to write three other novels: Behind Every Successful Man, Men of the South, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, as well as the Herman Charles Bosman Award, and 2014's London Cape Town Joburg, which won the K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award in 2015.

Zukiswa Wanner is co-editor, with Rohini Chowdhury, of the African-Asian short-story anthology Behind the Shadows.

Zukiswa Wanner was one of 66 writers to write a contemporary response to the Bible, the works being staged at the Bush Theatre and at Westminster Abbey in October 2011.

Zukiswa Wanner is a founding member of the ReadSA initiative, a campaign encouraging South Africans to read South African works.

Zukiswa Wanner sat on the pan-African literary initiative, Writivism's Board of Trustees until September 2016.

Zukiswa Wanner is a regular participant at international literary events and has conducted workshops for young writers in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Denmark, Germany and Western Kenya.

In 2015 Zukiswa Wanner was one of three judges of the Etisalat Prize for Literature, a Pan-African literary prize for book-length fiction, and she was the African juror for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2017.

Zukiswa Wanner has been the founder and curator of Artistic Encounters in Nairobi, Kenya.

In 2018, Zukiswa Wanner set up her publishing company, Paivapo, in partnership with her friend and businessperson Nomavuso Vokwana, with a focus on marketing African literature in the Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone African regions.

In November 2023, Zukiswa Wanner released a collection of essays entitled Vignettes of a People in an Apartheid State, reflecting what she witnessed in Palestine, where she went in May 2023 for the Palestine Festival of Literature.

In 2020, Zukiswa Wanner was awarded the Goethe Medal, a yearly prize given by the Goethe-Institut honouring non-Germans "who have performed outstanding service for the German language and for international cultural relations".