A Survey of African Poetry in the London Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement 1865-1985

Musaemura Zimunya was born in 1949 in Umtali, Rhodesia (now Mutare, Zimbabwe), to Mandiera Watch and Kufera Zimunya. In 1973, he was expelled from the University of Rhodesia for "disturbing the peace." While exiled in Great Britain, he studied at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1978 and a master's degree in 1979. His master's dissertation was later published as Those Years of Drought and Hunger: The Birth of African Fiction in English in Zimbabwe. He is the author of several poetry collections in English, including Selected Poems, Country Dawns and City Lights, Kingfisher, Jikinya, and Other Poems, and Thought Tracks. His Shona collections include Chakarira Chindunduma (Poems on the War). Zimunya is also the author of the short story collection Nightshift. In 1980, he returned to newly independent Zimbabwe, where he settled and married Viola Catherine. He took a position as a professor of English at the University of Zimbabwe, which he has held since. He has served as secretary general of the Zimbabwean Writers' Union. In 1992, he received a Fulbright Scholarship from the Pratt Institute in New York. He left Zimbabwe in 1999 for the United States, where he became the Director of Black Studies at Virginia Tech University.