NoViolet Bulawayo was born Elizabeth Zandile Tshele in Tsholotsho, Zimbabwe. She attended Njube High School and Mzilikazi High School. She moved to the United States for higher education, starting at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, transferring to Texas A&M University for her bachelor's degree, and getting a master's degree in English from Southern Methodist University and a master's in Creative Writing from Cornell University.
Bulawayo's debut novel, We Need New Names, was released in 2013 to general critical acclaim. Among the honors she received for this work were the Etisalat Prize for Literature and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and she made the competitive 2013 fiction...
