Obligations to the Wounded - Paperback

by Mubanga Kalimamukwento (Author)

Winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Longlist, 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction Winner, Minnesota Book Awards of 2025 Winner, 2025 CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist, 2024 Foreword Indies Award Cowinner, The Boston Globe's Best 75 Books of 2024 Winner The Minnesota Star Tribune Best Book of 2024 Cowinner, Brittle Paper 100 Notable African Books of 2024 Cowinner, The Continent's Top 5 African Books of 2024

In formally adventurous stories rooted in Zambian literary tradition, Obligations to the Wounded explores the expectations and burdens of womanhood in Zambia and for Zambian women living abroad. The collection converses with global social problems through the depiction of games, social media feuds, letters, and folklore to illustrate how girls and women manage religious expectation, migration, loss of language, death, intimate partner violence, and racial discrimination. Although the women and girls inhabiting these pages are separated geographically and by life stage, their shared burdens, culture, and homeland inextricably link them together in struggle and triumph.

Author Biography

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney and writer. She is the winner of the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, the 2019 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, and the 2019 Kalemba Short Story Prize. Her first novel, The Mourning Bird, was listed among the top fifteen debut books of 2019 by Brittle Paper. Her work has also appeared in adda, Aster(ix), Overland, the Red Rock Review, Menelique, on Netflix, and elsewhere.

When she's not writing, Mubanga serves as fiction editor for Doek! and as mentor at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.When she's not writing, Mubanga serves as fiction editor for Doek! and as mentor at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.