Panashe Chigumadzi is an award-winning writer, historian and professor of African History at Brandeis University. Chigumadzi is the author of
These Bones Will Rise Again (2018), a historical memoir reflecting on Robert Mugabe's military ouster through the spirits of anti-colonial heroine Mbuya Nehanda and her grandmother Mbuya Chigumadzi, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Prize for Non-fiction. Her 2015 debut novel
Sweet Medicine won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. Her first play,
Song Unburied, will be staged at the Edinburgh International Festival in July 2025. Chigumadzi was the founding editor of
Vanguard Magazine, a platform for black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa. A columnist for The
New York Times, and contributing editor of the
Johannesburg Review of Books, her work has also featured in publications including
The Guardian,
The Washington Post,
Boston Review,
The Los Angeles Review of Books,
Die Zieit,
Chimurenga,
The Sunday Times,
City Press,
Africa is A Country, and
Transition. She has delivered lectures such as the 2025 Princeton Africa Lecture, the 2023 ZAM Nelson Mandela Lecture at the Amsterdam International Theatre and the 2015 Ruth First Lecture at University of the Witwatersrand's Great Hall. She has held fellowships such as the Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Fellow-in-Residence at Iowa University’s International Writers Program and a 2025 Open Society Foundation Fellowship. Chigumadzi holds a doctorate from Harvard University’s Department of African and African American Studies, and has a master’s degree in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand.