‘Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is both a chronicler and a conjurer whose soaringimagination creates a Zimbabwean past made of anguish and hope, of gloryand despair: the story of the generations born at the crossroads of a country’shistory’
– THE WINDHAM-CAMPBELL PRIZE

★ Stupendous African Gothic, by Caine Prize judge and Yale University Windham-Campbell Prize winner.
★ Rights sold to German.

Showcasing African Gothic at its finest, THE CREATION OF HALF-BROKEN PEOPLE is the extraordinary tale of a nameless woman plaguedby visions. She works for the Good Foundation and its museum filled with artifacts from the family’s exploits in Africa, the Good familymembers all being descendants of Captain John Good, of KING SOLOMON’S MINE fame.
Our heroine is happy with her association with the Good family, until one day she comes across a group of protestors outside the museum.Instigating the group is an ancient woman, who our heroine knows is not real. She knows too that the secrets of her past have returned.After this encounter, the nameless woman finds herself living first in an attic and then in a haunted castle, her life anything but normal as herown intangible inheritance unfolds through the women who inhabit her visions.
With a knowing nod to classics of the Gothic genre, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu weaves the threads of a complex colonial history into thepresent through people “half-broken” by the stigmas of race and mental illness, all the while balancing the humanity of her charactersagainst the cruelty of empire in a hypnotic, haunting account of love and magic.

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is the author of four novels, the bestselling THE THEORY OF FLIGHT, winner of the 2019 SUNDAY TIMES Fiction Prize and currently a school set work in South Africa, its follow-up, THE HISTORY OF MAN, and THE QUALITY OF MERCY. Her work is published in South Africa and the United States, and can also be read in Arabic and Italian translation. A winner of Yale University’s 2022 Windham-Campbell Prize, she is a writer, filmmaker and academic who holds a PhD from Stanford University as well as master’s degrees in African Studies and Film from Ohio University. She has published research on Saartjie Baartman and she wrote, directed and edited the award-winning short film GRAFFITI. She was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.