Bibliofemme News

The announcement was made in a statement yesterday, "Vera died peacefully of meningitis in hospital in Toronto, Canada, Thursday in the presence of her mother Ericah Gwetai and her husband John Jose. She had so much to give and had already given so much, she will be remembered for a very long time. She will be greatly be missed by many all over the world."

Vera, who was considered one of the most gifted writers to emerge from Zimbabwe, was renowned for her poetical novels which dealt whith issues her fellow writers would rather avoid.

She published five novels and a collection of short stories, which were translated into at least seven languages. She also edited several anthologies of short stories by African woman writers.

Her literary works won her a string of awards including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Africa Region, Best Book) for her 1997 novel Under The Tongue and the 2002 Macmillan Writers' Prize for Africa for the novel "Stone Virgins".

Last year she was awarded the Swedish PEN Tucholsky Prize "for a corpus of works dealing with taboo subjects." Her 1998 novel Butterfly Burning was chosen among Africa's Best 100 books of the last century.

Born in September 1964 in Bulawayo, then Southern Rhodesia, Vera grew up in a township in that city, in which a number of her novels are set. After high school she left Zimbabwe for Canada, where she enrolled at York University, Toronto. She returned from Canada with a doctorate and was appointed director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo.

She had been living with her husband in Canada for the past year and was working on her sixth novel.

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