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Vera wins 2002 German Literature Prize

Yvonne Vera's Nehanda (1993) signalled the presence in Zimbabwe of a new and remarkable writer and her four subsequent novels have confirmed that she is the most important African novelist to have emerged during the 1990s.

Like other African writers, Vera's art is alert to public life whether this is manifested in significant moments of Zimbabwe's anti-colonial resistance, the emergence of Zimbabwe's township culture or the competing demands of the city and the rural home.

Vera's originality, however, derives from a refusal to register these with a conventional realism that accords them a spurious stability. Instead in prose as densely allusive as poetry, she records public experiences through the consciousness of her women characters who experience more than they understand and see more than they recognise.

Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera brings together critics from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Britain, the Caribbean and the United States who demonstrate through the diversity of their theoretical approaches the complex beauty of Vera's work. These essays show how Vera has expanded the formal possibilities of the African novel by giving the experiences of women the centrality that allows us to re-imagine Zimbabwe's past and present.

Contents:

• Language, Voice and Presence in Under The Tongue and Without a Name
  Kizito Z. Muchemwa
• 'A River in my Mouth': Writing the Voice in Under the Tongue
  Meg Samuelson
• The Habit of Assigning Meaning: Signs of Yvonne Vera's World
  Carolyn Martin Shaw
• Imaginary snapshots: cinematic techniques in the writing of Yvonne Vera
  Jane Bryce
• The Voice of Cloth: Interior Dialogues and Exterior Skins
  Jessica Hemmings
• Language, Kwela music and Modernity in Butterfly Burning
  Lizzy Attree
• A Woman Speaks of Rivers: Generation and Sexuality in Yvonne Vera's Novels
  Carolyn Martin Shaw
• Reclaiming The Body: A Memory for Healing in Yvonne Vera's Writing
  Meg Samuelson
• Iron Butterflies: Notes on Yvonne Vera's Butterfly Burning
  Ranka Primorac
• Yvonne Vera's Without a Name: Reclaiming that which has been taken
  Ruth Lavelle
• The Si(gh)te of the Dead Body: Dystopia as Resistance in Vera's Without a Name
  Robert Muponde
• Spirit Possession and the Paradox of Post-Colonial Resistance in Yvonne Vera's Nehanda
  Maurice T. Vambe
• Remapping the Colonial Space: Yvonne Vera's Nehanda,
• History, Gender and the Problem of Representation in the Novels of Yvonne Vera
  Nana Wilson-Tagoe
• A Comparative Analysis of Solomon Mutswairo and Yvonne Vera's Handling of the Legend of Nehanda
  Emmanuel Chiwome
• Between the pause and the waiting: the struggle against time in Yvonne Vera's Butterfly Burning
  Violet Lunga
• History Has Its Ceiling. The Pressures of The Past in The Stone Virgins
  Terence Ranger

This book will be available as follows:

• In South Africa through Stephan Phillips:
  contact Colin McGee - colinmcgee@mweb.co.za or Pamela Wood - pamelawood@metroweb.co.za
• In the UK through James Currey, Oxford:
  contact Lynn Taylor - lynn.taylor@jamescurrey.co.uk
• In the USA and Canada through the African Book Collective:
  contact Stephanie Kitchen - stephanie.kitchen@africanbookscollective.com

2002: 215 x 135; 252pp
ISBN 1 77922 004 9
Territory: World, excluding the UK