Career
She writes in English, though she also draws on Shona, her first language. If I write about Zimbabwe, it"s not the same as writing for Zimbabwe or for Zimbabweans.""
Gappah has law degrees from the University of Zimbabwe, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Graz. In 2010 she moved back to Harare, Zimbabwe, where she was working on her first novel.
According to her interview on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4 (05/04/2012) she has now completed that novel, The Book of Memory (Faber, 2015).
The fictional testament of an imprisoned woman on death row, hoping for a presidential reprieve, it was described by Maya Jaggi in The Guardian as "a powerful story of innocent lives destroyed by family secrets and sexual jealousy, prejudice and unacknowledged kinship", and by Anita Sethi in The Observer as "a moving novel about memory that unfolds into one about forgiveness, and a passionate paean to the powers of language".
