Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer. Her writing has already appeared in eight countries - she has written for
Prospect,
Farafina,
Per Contra,
the Guardian, the
Mail & Guardian,
Süddeutsche Zeitung and the
Zimbabwe Times and the website of
Granta magazine. Petina's writing awards include Zimbabwe's Mukuru Nyaya Award for comic writing, and a runner-up award in the SA/PEN HSBC short story competition judged by JM Coetzee.
An Elegy for Easterly won the Guardian First Book Award whilst the title story has been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Best Short Story Award. She has law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University in Austria and the University of Zimbabwe and currently works in Geneva as an international trade lawyer. In addition to English and her native language Shona, Petina also speaks German and French. Her first novel was
The Book of Memory (2015).