Petina Gappah

Petina Gappah, born in 1971, is a Zimbabwean writer. She grew up in Harare, studied law at Cambridge and Graz, and worked for more than ten years as a lawyer specialising in international trade law at the World Trade Organization in Geneva. She subsequently worked as an international trade adviser for the Zimbabwean government and other countries. In 2009, she received the Guardian First Book Award for her short-story collection An Elegy for Easterly. Her works published in German include the novel Die Farben des Nachtfalters and the story collection Die Schuldigen von Rotten Row.