Felix Mnthali

I began writing seriously as a way of learning how to help young writers who were featured on the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation’s programme WRITERS’ CORNER which began as a book review weekly chat and evolved into a discussion forum. I chaired that forum from 1970 to 1976. Meanwhile Chancellor College, University of Malawi was hosting a Writers’ Workshop frequented by students and staff.

My contributions to that forum also shaped my writing efforts. This was also the time when I used to carry a pocket recorder into which I dictated poems and rambling thoughts as I walked across the Zomba Golf course from my house to Chancellor College and back. It was a time of

creative ferment that was briefly and rudely interrupted on August 24, 1976 when I was thrown into detention.

That interruption begat more poetry, a couple of plays, some short stories and the beginings of longer fiction. My sojourn at the University of Ibadan bore three volumes of unpublished poems and the editing of a number of the short stories from WRITERS’ CORNER.

In 1984, I was one of the seven candidates from Africa who won Fellowships in the Rockefeller Foundation Research Programme called REFLECTIONS ON DEVELOPMENT. The results of that research have appeared in a number of articles were later reworked into a book called PERCEPTIONS OF CHANGE. In 1989, I was a visiting Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he worked on the topic, "Oral Literature Across the Atlantic: A Study in Adaptability".

I retired from the University of Botswana in 2010 as a Professor of English. I live in Mzuzu, Malawi with my wife.