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Batsirai Chigama continues to shine on the literary scene

Batsirai Chigama
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The sky isn’t the limit for Batsirai Chigama who continues to shine on the literary scene.

Batsirai Chigama (Zimbabwe) is a performer, poet, literary activist, and social commentator. The City of Asylum described her work as “surprising, shocking, and skillfully deliberate work,” and “a breath-taking embodiment of grief.”

Chigama’s debut collection, “Gather The Children,” won Outstanding First Creative Published Book at the National Arts Merit Awards in 2019.

In the same year, she was an honorary fellow at the International Writing Programme (IWP) at Iowa University. In 2021 she released her second poetry collection which was nominated and on 26 February 2022, Chigama won the National Arts Merit Awards (NAMA) Outstanding Poetry Book Award.

Batsirai is passionate about providing alternative narratives to those featured in mainstream media and her work with young people has taken her as far as Denmark and USA, performing and facilitating creative writing and spoken word workshops in schools.

About the author

Byron Adonis Mutingwende