User:Baba shingi/sandbox

Wonder Guchu (1969-) is a. award-winning Zimbabwean-born journalist, teacher, award-winning author and playwright. He runs a music blog www.intimatemomentswithzimmusicians.blogspot.com which features some of the interviews he has done with Zimbabwean musicians. He is the Xinhua Press Agency Namibian correspondent and a columnist for Southern Times. His two award-winning books - Sketches of High Density Life and My Children, My Home where published in 2004 and 2007 respectively. Sketches of High Density Life won the 2005 Zimbabwe Publishers Association first book award while My Children, My Home was nominated for the 8th National Arts Merit besk book award in 2009. He also wrote two plays - Alone But Together (2006) and Checkmate (2008) which ran at The Theatre in the Park in Harare. Alone But Together was nominated for the National Arts Merit Award in 2007. Guchu started his journalism career at the time he started teaching in Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe, in 1991. Back then he wrote short stories which were published by the now defunct Sunday Mail Magazine while at the same time freelancing for Masvingo Star. When he transferred to Harare in 1995, he freelancd for Parade Magazine, Read On, and Moto Magazine. At Parade Magazine, he workd with the late Mark Chavhunduka who later became the founding editor of the Standard weekly. When the Zimbabwe Independent was established in 1996, he was one of the very few who wrote book reviews for the weekly. It was also at the same time when he teamed up with others to form a community bi-weekly newspaper called Knowtown News. He doubled as the editor of the paper as well as the DTP operator from 1996 until 2000 when the paper folded. Over and above, he ran columns in The Standard, contributed reviews to The Herald's Scribes Scroll pages and was present when the now defunct Budding Writers Association of Zimbabwe was formed in 1990. In the early 2000, he left for England and when while there, he ran a column in The Standard called London-Line under the psydonym Ken Tendai Mano. On his return, he continued writing for The Standard until in 2004 when The Herald asked him to join the stable as a senior reporter. In 2005, he was elevated to the position of entertainment editor and then in 2006 he became the deputy news editor. His first journalism award came in the same year from the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists and in 2007, he was voted the National Arts Council best arts and culture print journalist. In 2008 after attending the first Arterial Conference at Goree Island in Senegal, Guchu founded artsinitiates-zimbabwe to, among things, train arts and culture reporters and organise festivals with funding from the Prince Claus Fund of Netherlands. One such training was done in 2008 in Harare in conjunction with the Harare International Festival of the Arts (Hifa). Ten journalists drawn from several media houses were involved. As a result of the training workshop, Guchu was the first in Zimbabwe to run an online arts and culture journal www.artsinitiates.co.zw. In 2009, he left Zimbabwe for Namibia where he worked first at the Windhoek Observer as a sub-editor and then moved to the tabloid Informante as a sub-editor until February 2011. In 2012, Guchu was instrumental in the establishment of a business weekly, The Villager newspaper. He was resposnible for the design, the content quality and the in-house training of the journalists.