Foto: privat

Itai Mushekwe was born in 1983. He studied communication and journalism at the Christian College of Southern Africa (CCOSA) in Harare, Zimbabwe. After graduating, he worked for the leading independent weekly newspaper The Zimbabwe Independent, where he wrote investigative articles about the mismanagement and inhuman policies in his country. During a professional training session in October 2007 in Berlin, he discovered his name was on a “black list” of undesirable dissidents back home. This led to an involuntary extension of his stay in Germany. From January to May 2008, he had a grant from the Heinrich Böll Foundation at the Böll House not far from Cologne, and participated in the German PEN Writers in Exile Program from June 2008 to May 2011. Itai Mushekwe is a political reporter for the London-based online publication The Zimbabwe Guardian. In December 2008, he won the Johann Philipp Palm Award for Freedom of Speech and the Press. He is the editor of an African online news magazine and writes investigative articles on Zimbabwe for the British newspapers Daily and Sunday Telegraph. He continues to live in Germany and was the founding editor of the African news web page The Telescope News in 2014. Currently, he is the chief editor of the news page Spotlight Zimbabwe.