Yvonne Vera

(1964 - 2005)

The novelist Yvonne Vera studied at York University in Toronto, earning her PhD in English literature in 1995. She later returned to her native city of Bulawayo to work as regional director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, installing local folk art and organizing workshops for women and children. “When I’m writing,” she said in 2000, “I take this series of images, and I put them on my desk, so to speak, as I write. This moment, frozen like that, is so powerful that I can’t lose sight of it, visually or emotionally. From it, I develop the whole story.” Vera died of meningitis at the age of forty in Toronto; her last novel, Obedience, remained unfinished.