note: On July 11, 2011, this story won the Caine Prize for African Writing. I hadn't grown up wanting to be a writer, though, so. Hitting Budapest A short story NoViolet Bulawayo Short Story NovemEd. SOCIAL A deeply felt, and fiercely written debut novel The New York Times.

There were lots of writing classes after that, and I was fortunate to meet kind and generous mentors, who taught and encouraged me. NOVIOLET BULAWAYO SEO A stunning debut novel. I was working toward the law track, but then I took a creative writing class at Kalamazoo Valley Community College and something clicked in my head in terms of what I was meant to do. How is it that you came to be a celebrated fiction writer? Your family expected you to study law when you first moved to Michigan. The novel is an artful, beautiful, harrowing, and unsentimental examination of what it means to be expelled not only from one's original home, but also from the home one hoped for before realizing it never existed. It became the opening of her first novel, We Need New Names, which tells the tale of Darling, a young girl who leaves her home in Zimbabwe for Michigan as her country falls apart under the rule of Robert Mugabe. Her brilliant story 'Hitting Budapest' had just been awarded the Caine Prize for African Writing. I met NoViolet Bulawayo at the first Open Book Festival in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2011. This Saturday, we shall discuss Hitting Budapest by NoViolet Bulawayo.