US: Zimbabwean writer shortlisted for 2025 DAG Prize For Literature

By thebritishblacklist.co.uk

Zimbabwean writer Yvette Lisa Ndlovu has been named as a finalist for the 2025 DAG Prize for Literature.

She is part of a five-person shortlist that also includes Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya, Mairead Small Staid, Eric Dean Wilson, and Michael Zapata.

Ndlovu describes herself as a Zimbabwean sarungano – a Shona term for “storyteller.”

Her short story collection, Drinking from Graveyard Wells, won the Cornell University 2023 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing, and was shortlisted for the Ursula Le Guin Prize for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Collection.

Ndovu earned her B.A. at Cornell University and her M.F.A. at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

She is the Newhouse Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wellesley College and the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Fellowship for Black writers.

She is currently working on her second book, Godsflower, an Afrosurrealist postcolonial fable set in New Zimbabwe, a fictional country haunted by its resurrected dictator.

This project uses the narrative structure of Ngano (Zimbabwean fabulism) to chronicle the absurdities of living under an authoritarian regime while also imagining a world in which these regimes fall.

The $20,000 DAG Prize for Literature is awarded annually to an emerging prose writer who has already published one book, but whose work has not yet received prominent literary recognition.

The Prize is meant to support a second project already substantially underway. Prize funds can be used for research, writing, editing, workshops, residencies, or other activities that facilitate the creation of a significant project in prose literature.

The Prize is powered by the DAG Foundation, which provides grants to early-career artists in the visual arts, music, and literature in the hopes of providing the resources and freedom they require to navigate those challenges and create the art of the 21st century.

Launched in 2024, DAG awarded one-time $20,000 grants in its inaugural year to nonprofit organisations with strong histories of nurturing innovative artists whose work explores new directions for their art forms.