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YVONNE Vera, one of Africa’s most celebrated authors, is this year’s winner of the German Literature Prize for a translation of Butterfly Burning.

The translation, Schmetterling in Flammen was published by Marino bei Frederking & Thaler last year.

It is a novel about life in Bulawayo townships during the 1940s. The original English novel was selected among Africa’s Best 100 books for the last century. The Bulawayo-based Vera becomes the first author from sub-Saharan Africa and second author from the continent to receive the prize given for outstanding works by women writers from Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Algerian Assia Djaber, whose novel L’ amour, la fantasia, was chosen among Africa’s top 12 books, won the prize in 1999.

Peter Ripken, a German literary consultant said Vera’s book was nominated in a survey in which German readers chose their favourite from German translations of works from the non-Western world.

The book was chosen the overall winner by a jury of readers, translators and booksellers. Vera will receive the prize of 500 euro (Z$27 500) at a ceremony in Frankfurt, Germany, on 6 October and will go on promotional readings at various venues in Germany.

The award comes months after Vera won the Macmillan Writers’ Prize for her latest novel, Stone Virgins, published by Weaver Press in Harare.

Meanwhile, Vera will be among eminent people who will feature at Frankfurt Futura Mundi, an international symposium to be presented for the first time this year as the highlight of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s new focal theme, Bridges for a World Divided.

Among the confirmed speakers to feature at the forum to be held at the Frankfurt Fair’s Congress Centre are writers Amos Oz (Israel), Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua), Assia Djaber (Algeria) and Angeles Mastretta (Mexico), Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson, the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees.