Academic and author of The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe, Simukai Chigudu, is expanding his writing beyond traditional academia and into narrative nonfiction: ‘I hesitated about making this move, questioning whether this is the kind of writing I "should" be doing and fearing how the world might react.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
My early encounters with literature veered haphazardly through many different genres and styles that it is hard to neatly characterize the kinds of book I read. At the more exalted end of the spectrum, I read bestselling literary fiction from India that my mother purchased from Schiphol, Jomo Kenyatta or Heathrow airports during her extensive travels. Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Rohinton Mistry were on my bookshelves; I was in awe of their command of language but didn’t understand their works as a whole. The context was too far removed from my own to be intelligible to me at the time.
I dipped into white writing about Africa, both memoir and autofiction written by the likes of...