Mwanza Mujila, Fiston

Fiston Mwanza Mujila, born in 1981 in Lubumbashi/Dem. Rep. of Congo, writes poetry, prose and plays. He studied literature in his hometown and, after stations in Belgium, France and Germany, came to Graz, Austria, as a writer-in-residence in 2009. He now lives there and teaches and holds a doctorate in African literature at the university. He first published poetry collections, but his literary breakthrough came with his first novel Tram 83 (Zsolnay, 2016), for which he was awarded numerous prizes, including the Grand Prix du Premier Roman of the Société des gens de lettres and the International Literature Prize of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Fiston frequently joins jazz musicians and other artists on stage for performative dialogue. Most recently, he traced the Black poets of Europe as a kind of cartographer and curated an anthology featuring more than 30 poets of the Black Diaspora, published by Das Wunderhorn in the summer of 2021.