Zodwa Nyoni

Zodwa Nyoni is a Zimbabwean-born poet, filmmaker and playwright based in Manchester, England.

Background

Nyoni was born around 1988 and she first moved to England in 1992, when she was aged four, because her father was awarded a scholarship to study for a master's degree in the textiles industry. After three years, the family returned to Zimbabwe. After a further three years, in 1999, the family returned to Leeds. At school in Leeds, Nyoni remembers pupils asking her sisters if they had lions and elephants in their garden in Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, they were referred to as 'the English girls'. Zodwa's father teaches at a university in Zimbabwe. She is one of seven children, five of them living in Leeds, with two half siblings in Botswana.

Education

She was educated at Roundhay School, Leeds City College, Leeds Beckett University and the University of Leeds.

Career

She started writing in 2005 with Leeds Young Authors (LYA), a community based performance poetry group. As a member of LYA, she represented the United Kingdom at the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam in New York City, USA in 2006. In addition she led poetry workshops in schools, prisons and community groups in Yorkshire and Lanchasire.^[1]

Her first play Boi Boi is Dead was first performed at the Leeds Playhouse in 2014. It was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. To prepare the play, Nyoni was awarded a 2013 Channel 4 Playwrights Award. Ode to Leeds was first performed at the Leeds Playhouse in 2017 and was reviewed with three stars by The Guardian. Poetry features throughout the play, as it follows the lives of young spoken word performers from Leeds. Nyoni's 2014 play, Nine Lives, was featured in a 2018 article on the migrant condition in British theatre. Early career awards include: Award for the Arts 2011 (Leeds Black Awards); Young Black and Asian Writers Award (The Big Issue in the North's Short Story Competition 2011; Ilkley Literature Festival (ILF)'s Apprentice Poet in Residence. Nyoni's next play is due to be staged at the Royal Exchange in Manchester in 2020. Experience of life in African diaspora is central to Nyoni's creativity. A recent work, debuted at Summerhall in 2019, was A Khoisan Woman - a play about the Hottentot Venus.