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 rainbathed pavements singing on the fingernails of the rainbow
In the aftermath of Napolo, I…
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Citation: Chalamanda, Fiona Johnson. "Steve Chimombo". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 January 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=861, accessed 11 May 2024.]
