Website : https://www.novuyotshuma.com — Novuyo Tshuma

"Even though there was no petrol, people were driving. Even though the country was experiencing hyperinflation, my mother was able to secure chicken portions with her whole salary, without doing anything illegal"

"Fiction allows me to make up events that happened but feel emotionally true…House of Stone took me six years to write, about 17 drafts. My aim was to fail spectacularly rather than succeed safely"

"I heard the stories from my father, passed down to him by his father, my grandfather, and which I shall one day pass down to my children."

"I think we also underestimate just how difficult it is to talk about this history and work through it. We need structures, we need state support. It cannot just be people looking through history. We need help as to how to look at that history and how to heal from that history"

"I remember during my writing of House of Stone, I went to therapy, and I took the book for therapy, I needed to also make sense and work through what excavation this issue was doing to me, to my psyche, to my body, my emotions"

"You know you will disappear. Like you’re causing trouble. You can’t go to the village and start asking these sorts of questions without causing trouble. Many activists in Zimbabwe have, you know, disappeared or paid the price. But for me the structure of House of Stone mirrors exactly what you’re talking about… the difficulty of excavating history"