Steve Chimombo

Poet, fiction writer, playwright, and children’s author Steve Bernard Miles Chimombo was born in Zomba, Malawi, and educated at the University of Malawi, the University of Wales, the University of Leeds, and Columbia University. Mythology and oral culture inform his poetry, and he frequently used both modernist techniques and wry humor to address political themes. 
 
His publications include the poetry collection Napolo and the Python (1994), the short story collection Tell Me a Story (1992), the novel The Basket Girl (1990), the children’s book The Bird Boy’s Song (2002), and the plays The Rainmaker (1978) and Wachiona Ndani? (1992), as well as the scholarly text Malawi Oral Literature: The Aesthetics of Indigenous Arts (1988). A collected poems, Napolo and Other Poems, was published in 2009. His work has been included in the anthologies The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories (1992) and The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry (1998). 
 
Chimombo served as editor and publisher of the arts magazine and literary press WASI and as director of Writers and Artists Services International. He lived in Malawi, where he was a professor of English at the University of Malawi, until his death in December 2015.