Steve Bernard Miles Chimombo (1945-2015) was a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and children’s author from Malawi. He was educated at the University of Malawi, the University of Wales, the University of Leeds, and Columbia University. His poetry is informed by mythology and oral culture, and he frequently used both modernist techniques and wry humor to address political themes.
His publications include the poetry collection Napolo and the Python (1994), the short story collection Tell Me a Story (1992), the novel The Basket Girl (1990), the children’s book The Bird Boy’s Song (2002), and the plays The Rainmaker (1978) and Wachiona Ndani? (1992), as well as the scholarly text Malawi Oral Literature: The Aesthetics of Indigenous Arts (1988). A poetry collection, Napolo and Other Poems, was published in 2009. Chimombo’s work has been included in the anthologies The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories (1992) and The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry (1998).
Chimombo served as editor and publisher of the arts and literary press WASI and as director of Writers and Artists Services International. He lived in Malawi, where he was a professor of English at the University of Malawi until his death.
