Dr Tembi Charles
OCLW’s Global Majority and Underrepresented Writers’ Programme is a highly competitive initiative offering eight scholarships to life-writers whose voices have historically been marginalised in publishing and academia. Alongside dedicated seminars and lectures, scholars receive skills training, mentorship, and community support. The Programme aims to ensure that the future of life-writing more fully reflects the broad and diverse range of voices that surround us.
Agents and publishers are warmly encouraged to contact scholars directly.
Tembi Charles is a Zimbabwean-born scholar and creative writer whose work explores identity, history, and colonialism. She holds a BA in English Literature and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of the Western Cape, an MA in English Studies from Stellenbosch University, and a PhD in Comparative Literature and African Studies from The Pennsylvania State University. With over a decade of university teaching experience, she brings expertise in rhetoric and composition, displacement and migration, World Literature, and poetics. Alongside her academic work, Tembi writes and performs poetry that investigates the politics of land, migration, and belonging.
Project Details:
During her time at OCLW, Tembi will be working on a creative non-fiction book that centres on her parents’ political involvement in the liberation struggle against the Rhodesian colonial regime. Interweaving family history with national memory, the project examines how settler colonialism disrupted family and community life in Zimbabwe. Rather than framing Zimbabweans as passive victims of history, Tembi’s narrative emphasises agency, resistance, and the capacity to imagine new futures. Her book seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the long-term impact of colonialism through the lenses of history, culture, identity, and personal narrative.
Selected Publications/Projects:
Tembi is a member of the EVOKE ARTivist Collective based in Oxford. In April 2025, she performed her poem Bulawayo at a community-centred event running in parallel with the Skoll World Forum. Her poems ‘Uhleko lolu ngolwani?’ and ‘Limitless Spirit’ appear in Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology Volume 2 (2017) and Best ‘New’ African Poets 2016 Anthology, respectively. Her academic article, “Sonic Sensibility: Reading the Soundscape in Diasporan Literary Works” (2023), explores how language, sound, and movement shape diasporic identities and aesthetics.
Contact Details:
Email: tembic79@gmail.com
