Mubanga Kalimamukwento – författare

Winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature PrizeLonglist, 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction | Winner, Minnesota Book Awards of 2025 | Winner, 2025 CLMP Firecracker Award | Finalist, 2024 Foreword Indies Award | Cowinner, The Boston Globe's Best 75 Books of 2024 Winner | The Minnesota Star Tribune Best Book of 2024 | Cowinner, Brittle Paper 100 Notable African Books of 2024 | Cowinner, The Continent's Top 5 African Books of 2024In formally adventurous stories rooted in Zambian literary tradition, Obligations to the Wounded explores the expectations and burdens of womanhood in Zambia and for Zambian women living abroad. The collection converses with global social problems through the depiction of games, social media feuds, letters, and folklore to illustrate how girls and women manage religious expectation, migration, loss of language, death, intimate partner violence, and racial discrimination. Although the women and girls inhabiting these pages are separated geographically and by life stage, their shared burdens, culture, and homeland inextricably link them together in struggle and triumph.

A woman on trial. A marriage built on silence. A culture that demands endurance.Sali, a working mother of three, is on trial for the murder of her husband, Kasunga. Accused of shooting him after a fight in their bedroom, she pleads not guilty and must rely on an overworked legal aid lawyer as a courtroom hungry for judgement looks on.Fourteen years earlier, Sali’s life was shaped by a different kind of violence. The pressure to conform, to endure, to shipikisha. When an affair with a wealthy, married man ends in sudden death, she enters a loveless marriage to escape the shame of unwed motherhood. What follows is a life marked by infidelity, financial strain, postnatal depression and quiet suffering, until endurance finally gives way.Told through a braided narrative moving between past and present, The Shipikisha Club is a powerful literary novel about marriage, motherhood and the devastating cost of silence in contemporary Zambia.