Works
Whilst at university, Vera submitted a story to a Toronto magazine: the publisher asked for more, so she sat down to write them. Her collection of short stories, Why Don't You Carve Other Animals was published in 1992. It was followed by five completed novels:
- Nehanda (1993), short-listed for Commonwealth Writers' Prize
- Without a Name (1994), awarded Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa and Zimbabwe Publishers' Literary Award
- Under the Tongue (1997)
- Butterfly Burning (2000), awarded German Literature Prize 2002, chosen as one of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century in 2002
- The Stone Virgins (2002), awarded Macmillan Writers' Prize for Africa
At the time of her death she was working on a new novel, Obedience. Her works have been published in Zimbabwe, Canada and several other countries, including translations into Spanish, Italian and Swedish.
Vera wrote obsessively, often for 10 hours a day, and described time when she was not writing as "a period of fasting." Her work was passionate and lyrical. She took on themes such as rape, incest and infanticide, and gender inequality in Zimbabwe before and after the country's war of independence with sensitivity and courage. She said, "I would love to be remembered as a writer who had no fear for words and who had an intense love for her nation." In 2004 she was awarded the Swedish PEN Tucholsky Prize "for a corpus of works dealing with taboo subjects".
Vera also edited several anthologies by Zimbabwean women writers.
Read more about this topic: Yvonne Vera
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)
“It’s an old trick now, God knows, but it works every time. At the very moment women start to expand their place in the world, scientific studies deliver compelling reasons for them to stay home.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.”
—William James (1842–1910)