Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), which was the first to be published in English by a Black woman from Zimbabwe, was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world.

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born on 4 February 1959 in Mutoko, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a small town where her parents taught at the nearby mission school.

[3][4][5][6] Her mother, Susan Dangarembga, was the first black woman in Southern Rhodesia to obtain a bachelor's degree,[7] and her father, Amon, would later become a school headmaster.

[3] In 1985, Dangarembga's short story "The Letter" won second place in a writing competition arranged by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and was published in Sweden in the anthology Whispering Land.

[6][10] Nervous Conditions, the first novel written in English by a black woman from Zimbabwe, received domestic and international acclaim, and was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Africa region) in 1989.

[14] Nervous Conditions is considered one of the best African novels ever written,[15] and was included on the BBC's 2018 list of top 100 books that have shaped the world.

[23] Her third novel, This Mournable Body, a sequel to The Book of Not and Nervous Conditions, was published in 2018 by Graywolf Press in the US, and in the UK by Faber and Faber in 2020, described by Alexandra Fuller in The New York Times as "another masterpiece"[13] and by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma in The Guardian as "magnificent ... another classic"[24] This Mournable Body was one of the six novels shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, chosen from 162 submissions.

[25][26] In an interview with Bhakti Shringarpure for Bomb magazine, Dangaremgba discussed the rationale behind her novels: "My first publisher, the late Ros de Lanerolle, asked me to write a sequel to Nervous Conditions.

I was captivated by the idea of writing a trilogy about a very ordinary person who starts off as an impoverished rural girl in colonial Rhodesia and has to try to build a meaningful life for herself.

"[27] In 2019, Dangarembga was announced as a finalist for the St. Francis College Literary Prize, a biennial award recognizing outstanding fiction by writers in the middle stages of their careers, which was eventually won that year by Samantha Hunt.

[32][33] Dangarembga won the 2021 PEN International Award for Freedom of Expression, given annually since 2005 to honour writers who continue working despite being persecuted for their writing.

[11] Dangarembga was chosen by English PEN as winner of the 2021 PEN Pinter Prize, awarded annually to a writer who, in the words spoken by Harold Pinter on receiving his Nobel Prize for Literature, casts an "unflinching, unswerving" gaze upon the world and shows a "fierce intellectual determination... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies".

[40] In her acceptance speech at the British Library on 11 October 2021, Dangarembga named the Ugandan novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija as the International Writer of Courage Award.

[46][47] On 28 September 2022, Dangarembga was officially convicted of promoting public violence after she and her friend, Julie Barnes, walked around Harare in a peaceful protest while holding placards that read “We Want Better.

She announced that she planned to appeal her verdict amid human rights groups claiming that her prosecution was a direct result of President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s attempts to “silence opposition in the long-troubled southern African country”.