WE NEED NEW NAMES

289pp., paperback, Reprint, London, (2013) 2021

Finalist for the Man Booker Prize. Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the LA Times Book Prize for First Fiction, the Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Legacy Award for fiction and the Etisalat Prize for Literature.

No Violent Bulawayo's debut novel about a young Zimbabwean girl forging a new life for herself in the USA. 

"How does a writer tell the story of a traumatised nation without being unremittingly bleak? NoViolet Bulawayo manages it by forming a cast of characters so delightful and joyous that the reader is seduced by their antics at the same time as finding out about the country's troubles." Leyla Sanai, The Independent

"NoViolet Bulawayo is a powerful, authentic, nihilistic voice - feral, feisty, funny - from the new Zimbabwean generation that has inherited Robert Mugabe's dystopia." Peter Godwin, author of The Fear and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

"NoViolet Bulawayo has created a world that lives and breathes - and fights, kicks, screams, and scratches, too. She has clothed it in words and given it a voice at once dissonant and melodic, utterly distinct." -Aminatta Forna, author of The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones

NoViolet Bulawayo grew up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. When she was 18, she moved to the USA. She earned her MFA at Cornell University and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her second novel, Glory, was published in 2022.