It’s the birthday of Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga (b. 1959), whose 1988 debut novel Nervous Conditions was included in the BBC’s 2018 list of the top 100 books that have shaped the world. (The WORLD, people. So pay attention.) The novel tells the story of Tambu, a teenager in war-torn Rhodesia determined to escape poverty and get an education.

(Fun fact: the top five novels on the list are, from first to fifth, The Odyssey, Homer, 8th century BC; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852; Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1818; Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949; Things Falls Apart, Chinua Achebe, 1958. Homer could not be reached for comment.)

Dangarembga was born in Mutoko, Rhodesia, lived in England for several years as a child, returned to Rhodesia, went back to England to study medicine at Cambridge, and finally got homesick and returned to Rhodesia just before it became Zimbabwe. She studied psychology at the University of Harare and began writing plays that were produced at the school, including The Lost of the Soil. In 1987, she published the play She No Longer Weeps and the next year, at 25, published Nervous Conditions, the first novel published in English by a black Zimbabwean woman. In 1989, the novel won the African section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Dangarembga then began studying film in Berlin and in 1996 made the film Everyone’s Child, a drama about two teens struggling to support their siblings after their parents die of AIDS. The film played in festivals around the world. Dangarembga returned to Zimbabwe and in her copious free time founded a film production company and the Women’s Film Festival of Harare. In 2006, Dangarembga published The Book of Not: A Sequel to Nervous Conditions, and in 2018 came out with another sequel, This Mournable Body, in which Tambu is now middle-aged and still fighting injustice and scrabbling to make a living. (NB: This Mournable Body is written in second person, while the first two novels are written in first person. Reading the trilogy in order is supposed to be very helpful.)

Read something worth reading this fine gray Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.