Mubanga Kalimamukwento Returns with Second Novel, The Shipikisha Club
By Musonda Mukuka
Award-winning Zambian author Mubanga Kalimamukwento has returned to the publishing scene with the much-anticipated The Shipikisha Club, released on 10 March 2026.
Published by Dzanc books The Shipikisha Club continues Kalimamukwento’s tradition of centering the experiences of Zambian women. The novel focuses on Sali, a mother on trial for the murder of her husband. After a gunshot went off in the aftermath of a heated marital dispute, Sally is both a suspect and the only witness to her innocence. Through three generations of women, Sali’s mother – Peggy, Sali’s daughter – Ntashe and Sali herself, the story shows its beginning long before the sound of a gunshot, tracing Sali’s path from rejecting marriage and navigating a doomed relationship to entering a marriage marked by infidelity, financial hardship, and emotional abuse. In doing so, the novel situates Sali’s present within a wider inheritance of silence, endurance, and survival, asking what it means for women to carry both personal and generational wounds.
The Shipkisha Club took home the 2024 Dzanc Prize for Fiction, the same year Mubanga became the first African woman to win the prestigious Drue Heinz Prize for Literature for her short story collection Obligations to the Wounded. Mubanga also serves as the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Ubwali Literary Magazine, an initiative providing much-needed visibility and mentorship for both Zambian and African writers. Through this work, she has played a key role in shaping a new generation of voices, creating space for stories that might otherwise remain unheard. Despite her international success, Mubanga’s writing career started in Zambia in 2019 when she won the Kalemba Short Story Prize and published her debut novel, The Mourning Bird. The author also has a poetry collection out entitled Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies, further cementing her place as one of the country’s most dynamic and versatile literary voices.
An excerpt from The Shipikisha Club is available to read here.