Flora Veit-Wild

Flora Veit-Wild (born 18 May 1947) is a German literary academic, Professor of African Literatures and Cultures at Humboldt University, Berlin. She has published on the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, and on the body and madness in African literature.

Life Flora Wild was born in West Germany in 1947, and originally studied French and German languages and literature at university.

She first met Dambudzo Marechera in Harare in 1983 in the office of writer and editor Charles Mungoshi. Veit-Wild and Marachera had a relationship, and remained close friends until his death in 1987. Veit-Wild lived in Zimbabwe from 1983 to 1993. In 1986 she met Dieter Riemenschneider in Harare, who subsequently supervised a PhD dissertation by Veit-Wild on the social history of Zimbabwean literature, which she gained in Anglistik from Frankfurt University in 1991.

In a 2012 essay, Veit-Wild revealed that she had tested HIV-positive in 1987 after her relationship with Dambudzo Marechera, who himself died later that year in Harare from an AIDS-related illness. In her early fifties, Veit-Wild was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, an HIV-related cancer.

The academic Agnieszka Piotrowska made a 2014 film about Veit-Wild's relationship with Marechera, Flora and Dambudzo.

Works (ed.) The Black Insider. Harare: Baobab Books. Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature. London; New York; Hans Zell Publishers, 1992. (ed.) Cemetery of Mind: Collected Poems of Dambudzo Marechera by Dambudzo Marechera. Harare, Zimbabwe: Baobab Books, 1992. Dambudzo Marechera: a source book on his life and work. London; New York: Hans Zell, 1992. (ed.) Scrapiron blue by Dambudzo Marechera. Harare: Baobab Books, 1994. (ed. with Anthony Chennell) Emerging perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera. Asmara: Africa World Press, 1998. (ed. with Dirk Naguschewski) Body, Sexuality, and Gender. New York: Rodopi, 2005. (ed. with Alain Ricard) Interfaces between the oral and the written / Interfaces entre l'écrit et l'oral. New York: Rodopi, 2005. Writing Madness: Borderlines of the Body in African Literature. Oxford: James Currey, 2006. They Called You Dambudzo: A Memoir. Jacana Media Ltd, 2020.