Glory

‘Glory took about three years to create. I was lucky in the sense that I could fully commit to a rigorous writing schedule with no other obligations during that whole time, otherwise it would have taken much longer than that.

‘I value the process of thinking and writing on paper, and so my first multiple drafts must be written in longhand. This can mean a nightmare when it comes to managing longer drafts, but the process has a clarity and intimacy I can’t seem to achieve on a gadget, and that makes it all worth it. I do enough research to allow me to know my material, then I put it aside and tell the story.’

Read the full interview here.

‘A fictional country of animals ruled by a tyrannical and absolute power is on the verge of liberation. The fiction becomes almost reality as we picture the parallel between this Animal Farm, Zimbabwe, and the fate of many African nations. An ingenious and brilliant political fable that bears witness to the surreal turns of history.’

Jake Cline, The Washington Post

‘The gulf between the world as it is and the world as it could be is as wide in Bulawayo’s novel as it is outside it. The actions depicted in the book are so familiar, the events so recognizable, the pain so acute, it’s easy to see how Glory began as a work of nonfiction. That the characters are animals — furred, feathered, scaled and all — is almost incidental.’

Franklin Nelson, Financial Times

‘The author deploys a diverse cast of ordinary citizens to map how individual lives have been stunted by the ruling party. She also sets in motion a sub-plot that assumes greater importance as the novel reaches its climax […] At intervals, Bulawayo captures the buzz and occasional bitterness of online exchanges and, in a kind of literary vox pop, briefly enters unnamed characters’ heads, revealing a mixture of hope, apathy and anger at the fate of their homeland.’

Susi Wyss, Washington Independent Review of Books

‘At 400 pages, Glory is also more than triple the length of Animal Farm and much more ambitious, rife with themes of sorcery and the supernatural, tribalism, and the subjugation of women … While Bulawayo’s peppering of the text with non-English words — such as ‘tholukuthi,’ a Zulu word used for emphasis — might prove distracting to some readers, one doesn’t need to know their literal translation to follow the book’s trajectory. Even more accessible is the humor she manages to find amid the darkness, usually used to mock the animals in charge.’

Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

‘Playing with language — hacking it to make it fit for purpose — is the key to unlocking the literary metaverse of Glory, which is all about personalising a very public story […] Playfulness is Bulawayo’s stock-in-trade and it’s inescapably funny that the animals in Glory are contemporary human-style beings. Here are dogs, horses, cats and birds who text, watch Al Jazeera and get their nails done.’

Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

‘NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel Glory is bound to evoke George Orwell’s Animal Farm for many readers. But this is no reboot. Beyond those broad similarities, Bulawayo’s story is her own […] Bulawayo skillfully deletes humans from the world of Jidada, right down to clever linguistic choices like “femal,” a portmanteau of “animal” and “female” used for animals who would be called women if they were human, and its sly counterpart, “mal”.’