OBLIGATIONS TO THE WOUNDED, stories

192pp., paperback, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2025

ISBN: 9780822967545

Winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

A collection of formally adventurous stories that explore the expectations and burdens of womanhood in Zambia and for Zambian women living abroad.

"These thematically linked stories deliver an intricate study of Zambian women living both in Zambia and abroad who are weighing their options for whom to love, where to live, where to work. The author, with a poet’s restraint, has written stories that deftly negotiate the challenges and tribulations women face when they feel the pressure and duty to yield to the will of family, community, customs, country, and spiritual beliefs." Angie Cruz, Drue Heinz Literature Prize judge and author of How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water

"Rendered in rich, rolling, and riveting prose, Obligations to the Wounded is written with great care, pacing, and hard-won wisdom by one of Africa’s most talented writers. This collection ... offers the reader something approaching a universal understanding of the challenges women face in contemporary African and world societies." Rémy Ngamije, author of The Eternal Audience of One

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney and writer. She is the winner of the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, the 2019 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, and the 2019 Kalemba Short Story Prize. She is the author of the novel, The Mourning Bird, and her work has also appeared in adda, Aster(ix), Overland, the Red Rock Review, Menelique, and elsewhere. She serves as fiction editor for Doek! and as mentor at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.