Panashe is an essayist and novelist. Her first novel, Sweet Medicine, was published in 2015 (Blackbird Books) and won the K. Sello Duiker Literary Award in 2016. In 2018 her second book These Bones Will Rise Again was published as the first book of The Indigo Press. She is the founding editor of Vanguard magazine, a platform for young black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa, and a contributing editor to Johannesburg Review of Books. Panashe has written for several outlets and she was also the curator of the inaugural Abantu Book Festival in South Africa.
Her writing is also included in the New Daughters of Africa anthology. Furthermore, she is now a doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s Department of African and African American Studies.

In this episode recorded during the African Book Festival Berlin, we talk about slippery genre categories, re-imagining historiography, spiritual mediums, resistance narratives, gender, and questions of representation.

Note: This episode was recorded in a hotel lobby - and there are background noises at times.