Steve Chimombo was born in 1945 in Zomba, Malawi, the old colonial capital. He attended the Zomba Catholic Secondary School and took his BA at the University of Malawi, and then gained postgraduate degrees at the University of Wales and Columbia University in the USA where his exposure to modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot influenced his poetic voice, which was already steeped in Malawian oral culture. His early poetry is characterised by irony, suggestiveness and compression, suited to the claustrophobic climate of writing under the paranoid censorship of Hastings Kamuzu Banda's regime, as in this example from his Napolo Poems:

In the aftermath of Napolo,
I emerge from the chaosis
and march down rainbathe

This article in full comprises 265 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

First published 08 January 2001

Citation: Chalamanda, Fiona Johnson. "Steve Chimombo". The Literary Encyclopedia. 8 January 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=861, accessed 20 November 2009.]

This article is copyright to ©The Literary Encyclopedia. For information on making internet links to this page and electronic or print reproduction, please click here.