Charles Mungoshi (Charles Muzava Mungoshi) Biography

Zimbabwean novelistand short-story writer, born near Enkeldoorn in the Manyene Tribal Trust Land, educated at St Augustine's Secondary School. After working with the Rhodesian Forestry Commission and as a clerk in a book-distribution company, he entered publishing in 1975 and became Literary Director of the Zimbabwe Publishing House in 1981. Mungoshi is the most eminent Zimbabwean author writing in both English and Shona. Waiting for the Rain (1975), his only novel in English to date, is widely regarded as the masterpiece of fiction by a Zimbabwean writer; its portrayal of an educated son's alienation from his family powerfully evokes unrest and malaise in the decade before Zimbabwean Independence in 1980. His short stories, which combine a strong element of political protest with their vividly imaginative use of landscape, are collected in Coming of the Dry Season (1972), which was banned before Independence, and Some Kinds of Wounds (1980); a selection from these books is contained in The Setting Sun and the Rolling World (1980). His three novels in the Shona tongue (1970, 1975, 1983), like much of his writing in English, are concerned with the tensions accompanying cultural change.