Ethel Maqeda

What was your favorite book as a child?

The Pacesetters series were my favourite childhood reading. I inherited the books from my older siblings and read every one I could get my hands on. Through those stories I travelled across Africa without ever leaving home. I encountered bustling cities like Lagos, Abuja, Nairobi, and Lusaka, where people lived lives that felt both familiar and wonderfully different from my own. The books were full of markets, schools, buses, neighbourhoods, and families, capturing the energy, humour, and complexity of everyday African life.

In the Pacesetters books African lives belonged at the centre of stories, thrilling stories. They celebrated ordinary people rather than stereotypes and introduced me to a continent that was rich, diverse, and interconnected. They made me curious about places beyond the small city where I grew up and, perhaps most importantly, they helped me see that the stories of people like us were worth telling.

What was the original reason or motivation why you started writing creatively?

I started writing because there were stories I couldn’t find on bookshelves. Growing up in Zimbabwe and later rebuilding my life in Britain after seeking asylum, I realised that many of the experiences I knew intimately were either missing from literature or told by people looking in from the outside. Writing became a way of preserving memory, asking difficult questions, and making sense of displacement. It also became a way of honouring the women in my family, whose lives were rich with humour, resilience, contradiction, and wisdom but were rarely recorded. Even now, I write to bear witness. I want my work to capture the ordinary moments that history often overlooks, because I believe those everyday lives reveal the deepest truths about who we are.

What was the most adventurous or thrilling thing you ever did/experienced?

I recently found this announcement from 2012, and it brought back so many memories.

“It’s a Long Walk to Nelson Mandela Avenue” was my first ever published story, appearing in Big Writing for a Small World, published by English PEN. Seeing my name in print for the first time felt both surreal and affirming. It was the moment I began to believe that the stories I carried — of Zimbabwe, migration, memory, and belonging — had a place in literature.

The anthology grew out of creative writing workshops that brought together writers from many different countries. We later travelled to London for the book launch, where we each read from our work. It was the first time I had ever read my writing publicly — another milestone that felt both terrifying and exhilarating. I had no idea then how many more readings, workshops, and literary events lay ahead.

Looking back, I realise how important those early opportunities were. They didn’t just help me develop as a writer; they gave me permission to trust my own voice.

Fourteen years later, I’m still writing, still telling the stories I believe need to be told, especially those of Zimbabwean women whose lives too often disappear beneath the louder narratives of conflict and politics.

Every writing journey begins somewhere. For me, it began here. Thank you, English PEN, for giving my first story — and my voice — a place to begin.

Do you listen to music while reading or writing?

No, I don’t. For me, reading, writing, and listening to music are three separate experiences, and I like to give each my full attention. When I’m reading or writing, I want to be completely immersed in the words. Music has its own power to evoke memories and emotions, and I find that it competes with the rhythm of language rather than complementing it. I enjoy music immensely, but I prefer to listen to it on its own, allowing it to speak for itself. In the same way, I like stories to unfold without distraction, so I can hear the voices of the characters and the cadence of the sentences as clearly as possible.