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Poet

Ignatius T. Mabasa

Ignatius T. Mabasa

Ignatius T. Mabasa

(Zimbabwe, 1971)
Biography
Ignatius Tirivangani Mabasa is one of the better known of the post-independence writers in Zimbabwe. He is a performing poet, novelist and storyteller. He has published two collections of poems in Shona: Tipeiwo Dariro and Muchinokoro Kunaka, and a satirical novel, Mapenzi .
Mapenzi won the Zimbabwe Book Publishers’ Association award in 1999 and one of his works was recently nominated as one of Zimbabwe’s 75 Best Books of the 20th Century by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair.

Mabasa mainly writes in Shona and is currently finalising two novels. He is also working on a translation of one of Zimbabwe’s leading and celebrated female writer\'s, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s ground-breaking novel, Nervous Conditions.

On the site we have included a selection of Shona poems which the author has translated into English himself. The translations are not word for word, nor are they meant to be direct reproductions of the originals but are intended to function as original poems in their own right.

Ignatius Mabasa works for the British Council in Zimbabwe. He can be contacted by mail.
© Irene Staunton
Bibliography

Tipeiwo Dariro, College Press, 1993
Muchinokoro Kunaka, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 2004 
Mapenzi, College Press, 1990
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