NoViolet Bulawayo was born and raised in Zimbabwe and attended high school there. She completed her college education in the US, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from Texas A&M University-Commerce and Southern Methodist University respectively. In 2010, she completed a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Cornell University, where her work was recognized with a Truman Capote Fellowship. Bulawayo won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story "Hitting Budapest," about a gang of street children in a Zimbabwean shantytown. With her first novel, We Need New Names, released in May, 2013, she has begun work on a memoir project.