Steve Chimombo

Fiona Johnson Chalamanda (University of Stirling)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 8.2.3: Anglophone African Writing and Culture: Subsaharan.
Vol. editors: Helen Rachel Cousins (Newman University), David Firth (University of Manchester), Alex Nelungo Wanjala (University of Nairobi)

Dates

Born 4 Sep 1945
Activity 1965-ongoing

Places

Born in Malawi
Active in Malawi

Activities

Primary

Playwright / Dramatist
Poet

Other

Novelist

Resources

Steve Chimombo was born in 1945 in Zomba, Malawi, the old colonial capital. He attended the Zomba Catholic Secondary School and took his BA at the University of Malawi, and then gained postgraduate degrees at the University of Wales and Columbia University in the USA where his exposure to modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot influenced his poetic voice, which was already steeped in Malawian oral culture. His early poetry is characterised by irony, suggestiveness and compression, suited to the claustrophobic climate of writing under the paranoid censorship of Hastings Kamuzu Banda's regime, as in this example from his Napolo Poems:

In the aftermath of Napolo,
I emerge from the chaosis
and march down …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

265 words

Citation: Chalamanda, Fiona Johnson. "Steve Chimombo". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 January 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=861, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here