Acclaimed novelist, essayist and short story writer NoViolet Bulawayo will read from her work on April 17 as part of the Allan Hamilton Dickson Fund Spring Writers Series at Wilkes University. The reading, hosted by the Wilkes English Department, will be at 7 p.m. in the Salon of Kirby Hall, 202 S. River St., Wilkes-Barre. Bulawayo also will conduct a workshop with Wilkes students that day. The event is free and open to the public.
She is the author of the novel We Need New Names, which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. It was recognized with the LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Pen/Hemingway Award, and the Etisalat Prize for Literature. It also was selected to The New York Times Notable Books of 2013 list, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers list and others. In writing about her novel in The New York Times, Uzodinma Iweala praised Bulawayo’s “striking ability to capture the uneasiness that accompanies a newcomer’s arrival in America, to illuminate how the reinvention of the self in a new place confronts the protective memory of the way things were back home.”
Bulawayo’s story “Hitting Budapest” won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing. A native of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo earned the master of fine arts degree from Cornell University and is now the Jones Lecturer in fiction at Stanford University.
