Press
Interviews and Profiles
BBC Network Africa Video Interview
Petina Gappah talking to Bola Mosuro about her new work of fiction, 'An Elegy for Easterly'.
Their discussion touches on on two stories from the collection, An Elegy For Easterly and The Golden Triangle.
Petina also reads extracts from both stories for BBC Network Africa.
Ben Wilson, author of What Price Liberty talks about freedom with Petina Gappah
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=640PLxvtMxQ
BBC World Service, The Strand, with Harriet Gilbert.
Interviewed by George Alagiah, 21 April 2008
Gappah's sense of humour was to the fore when she arrived at the Guardian to record one of her short stories earlier this year. She speaks with the precision that comes from a 10-year career in trade law, but is quick to laugh, her short frame filled with the energy that comes from realising a long-held dream. Her debut brings together a vibrant cross-section of Zimbabwean life – shanty-town kids poking fun at the local madwoman, the treasury department official's trophy wife adrift in a Harare mansion, the rural family waiting for news of a wayward son over in England – and tells their stories with a simple humanity and wit that have made her one of this summer's most exciting new voices.
Petina Gappah: Interview with Richard Lea
Listen to Petina reading her story The Mupandawana Dancing Champion
...[T]he rewards for Gappah are potentially huge – not just financially but in terms of how the deserved success of this first collection will thrust the spotlight on how life is in Zimbabwe. It is quite something for a new author who admits there was no initial coherent plan for An Elegy For Easterly. “I just wrote stories, one after the other, in part to test and stretch their writing,” she says with some bafflement at the praise they’re receiving. “So it’s difficult for me to talk about an intention behind the book. But if anything, my success is good news for a country sorely in need of it.” Zimbabwe might well be in need of such news. But the rest of the world is sorely in need of authors such as Gappah.
A Sense of Hope, The National, United Arab Emirates
Petina Gappah laughs heartily at the idea of being an over-achiever. ... Behind the warmth of her conversation, though, Gappah has a strong sense of anger and that's where these stories came from, in reaction to the terrible events taking place in Zimbabwe. She is very specific about when she started writing: May 2006. 'It was like a stream, all these stories coming,' she says. 'There was so much going on in Zimbabwe and I channelled all my anger and frustration into these stories. I wrote 22 stories in a year.' An Elegy For Easterly is a quiet storm of a collection, conjuring up the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans struggling to live under the horror of Robert Mugabe's regime.
Her voice is slightly hoarse when we meet on the final day of the [Franschoek Literary Festival], her trendy orange Globetrotter trunk packed and ready for the next leg of her whirlwind southern African promotional tour. Despite the punishing schedule, she radiates enthusiasm, energy and humour.
[Her] attention to detail is minute, - the zhing-zhong products from China, the shiny clothes spelling out cheerful poverty, the red lips that signpost the disease that so many deny even while dying from it. "Writing for me is a compulsive form of theft", says Gappah who never travels anywhere without a notebook. "I take a little here, a little there and make it into fiction".
Jacqui L'Ange, The Cape Times
PETINA Gappah, a rising star in Zimbabwean literature, recently celebrated in Harare the launch of her volume of short stories entitled An Elegy for Easterly. Because Petina has been living abroad, there was a sense of pride and of homecoming as well-known poet Musa Zimunya commenced proceedings and congratulated Petina on her achievements. Clad in his trademark velour cap and shirt of many colours, Zimunya touched on some of the most moving of her narratives. Petina, whose work has been published in eight countries, has been promoting her collection of stories on a tour traversing America and South Africa, and culminating in her hometown, Harare.
Diana Rodriguez, Financial Gazette
The powerful stories in An Elegy for Easterly, Petina Gappah’s debut short story collection, reflect contemporary Zimbabwe in a variety of its aspects. Here is the squalor of those oppressed by Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF, as well as those who have been crushed by a rising middle class which visits suffering on its own and on those left floundering beneath it.
Maureen Isaacson, The Sunday Independent, South Africa
Skrywer Petina Gappah is ‘n vars, nuwe vrouestem uit Zimbabwe. Haar debuutbundel, An Elegy for Easterly (Faber & Faber, R199) bevat 13 kortverhale wat almal ‘n konneksie met haar vaderland, Zimbabwe, het. In haar verhale beskryf sy haar karakters met wrangheid en humor en ten spyte van die guurheid oor die land wat deurskemer, is daar tog positiwiteit in die stories. Sy bewonder die veerkragtigheid van die Zimbabwiërs om terug te bons en glo dat humor help om die tragiek van gewone mense se situasies te verlig.
BBC Radio 4, Start the Week, panel discussion hosted by Andrew Marr with guests Andrew Feinstein, Petina Gappah, Adam Gopnik and Nandan Nilekani.
These fresh voices represent the advent of a new generation, a changing of the guard: the writers are among the “born frees”, who came of age after independence in 1980. Mostly in their 20s and 30s, educated and well travelled, they represent a different viewpoint in so far as they are not pre-occupied with Zimbabwe’s liberation war and see themselves as part of a wider world. And while they appreciate the tragedy of the Zimbabwean situation, they are able to distance themselves from it in recognition of its many absurdities.
They Write What They Like, Melissa de Villiers reflects on new Zimbabwean writers in the Sunday Times, South Africa, 26 April 2009
The Arts Show - Cúirt International Festival of Literature, presented by Seán Rocks
Comic Elegies and Dead Dancers, An interview with African Writing.
Interview with Emmanuel Sigauke, Munyori Literary Journal