Monday 17 August at 19:30 SAST
Tanaka Chidora is a poet, literary critic and academic who teaches Creative Writing and Theories of Literature in the Department of English at the University of Zimbabwe.
His first poetry anthology is titled Because Sadness is Beautiful? (2020) and is his way of giving to sadness a gentle thrill. Award winning author, David Mungoshi, has described Chidora’s writings, especially his poetry collection in Because Sadness is Beautiful? as vivid, scatological and subversive. Tanaka is also working on his first novel which is an auto-fictional narrative of his growing up in one of Harare’s oldest ghettoes, Mbare. His first short story, ‘Days of the Sun’, was published in 2019 in a mixed genres anthology, Chitungwiza Mushamukuru (published by Mwanaka Media and Publishing) whose contributing authors and artists are from Zimbabwe’s largest ghetto town, Chitungwiza. Tanaka has side affairs in the form of short stories that he keeps somewhere safe until they are enough to constitute an anthology, a Chitungwiza commuter’s diaries of life aboard the government bus, a collection of poems titled The Poet’s Press Conference and another collection of Shona poems that he promises to publish once he is done writing. Besides creative writing, Tanaka runs a blog on which he alternates between reviewing books and writing short pieces about what the books he has read remind him of, or about general episodes in his life that read like stories from a book. Sometimes, he posts bits and pieces on his Facebook wall, Twitter and Instagram.
