Author Andrew Chatora receives 2024 Anthem Award for his recent novel

Zimbabwean author living in the United Kingdom – Andrew Chatora, is recognized at the 2024 Anthem Awards for Silver Category in the United States for his third novel titled “Harare Voices and Beyond”. The novel is published by a Chicago publisher known as ‘Kharis Publishing’.

In February 2023, an imprint of Kharis Media selected the book for its contribution to the land reform discourse and race relations in post-colonial Africa.

As per the sources, the 3rd edition of the annual Anthem Awards was observed on Jan 30, 2024, at a cocktail reception in New York. The award ceremony acknowledged the celebrity author with special achievement awards.

Reportedly, the participants were selected from published works of fiction and non-fiction, history books, children’s literature, essays and op-eds. “It also included the documents or articles raising awareness for diversity, equity and inclusion,” said the organisers of the awards, launched in 2021.

The story in Chatora’s novel portrays the troubled lives of a white commercial farming family that dramatically loses their father and farm in Mazowe, Zimbabwe. The story is surrounded in the post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme that aims to correct historical imbalances on land.

The family is then caught up in a wave of misunderstandings. In this situation, the mother and one of the boys kill the younger of the siblings by accident. With that fear, they secretly buried his body in their home, but later it was eventually discovered.

The boys then “going native”, as they get involved in spaces and activities, which are not usually associated with the well-heeled white masters of Zimbabwe, since the then settled occupation.

Being the newcomers to a world that they had only watched from a safe distance, the boys didn’t know that they have to pay a price when one falls from privilege. In colonial discourse, the term “going native” means that the white man is becoming one of the “savages’ or the natives, to the extent of eating what they eat and eventually feeling as they do.

Notably, among the leading luminaries honored in 2024 Anthem Awards were Hollywood actors Matt Damon and Kevin Bacon. Some of the other renowned recipients of the Special Lifetime Achievement award were Misty Copeland, Aurora James and Leon Ford, inter Alia.

Above mentioned, people are the ones who have distinguished themselves in different genres or spheres of life and are thus honoured. Zimbabwean author Andrew Chatora joined this elite group of writers.