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Togara Muzanenhamo

  • About
  • Reviews
  • Awards
  • Togara Muzanenhamo was born to Zimbabwean parents in Lusaka, Zambia in 1975. He was brought up in Zimbabwe, and then went on to study in The Hague and Paris. He became a journalist in Harare and worked for a film script production company. His work has appeared in magazines in Europe, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and was included in Carcanet's anthology New Poetries in 2002. He has published three collections of poetry, Spirit Brides (2006), Gumiguru (2014), and most recently Virga, a Poetry Book Society Autumn Recommendation for 2021. He has been shortlisted for the Jerwood Alderburgh First Collection Prize and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.
    'Follows various weathers and global histories, speaking through a staggering variety of experiences'

    Seán Hewitt, Irish Times Best Books of the Year 2021

     'Muzanenhamo wears his erudition and research with ease, finding the cracks of light in historical documents and prising them open... There is an energetic tightness to Muzanenhamo's verse that can be turned to both the disturbing and the musical. He is always conscious of the revelatory capacity of syntactical compactness, creating a poetry that is both rooted in the earth and invested in the possibility of metaphysics.'
    Sean Hewitt, The Irish Times

    'Togara Muzanenhamo's second collection, named for the hot and dry tenth month of the Shona calendar, is a harsh but heartfelt tribute to the people and landscapes of the author's native Zimbabwe [...] this poet has a rare gift and should be admired for the risks he takes, which have enabled him to write some unusual, moving and yet understated poems about conflict, love and work'
    Times Literary Supplement, 16.10.2015.
    Awards won by Togara Muzanenhamo Winner, 2022 The African Poetry Book Fund's Luschei Prize for African Poetry (Virga) Commended, 2021 Poetry Book Society Autumn Recommendation (Virga) Runner-up, 2015 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry  (Gumiguru)
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