Irene Staunton
Zimbabwean publisher, editor, researcher and writer,
Irene Staunton is a Zimbabwean publisher, editor, researcher and writer, who has worked in literature and the arts since the 1970s, both in the UK and Zimbabwe. She is co-founder and publisher of Weaver Press in Harare, having previously co-founded Baobab Books. Staunton is the editor of several notable anthologies covering oral history, short stories, and poetry, including Mothers of the Revolution: War Experiences of Thirty Zimbabwean Women (1990), Children in our Midst: Voices of Farmworker's Children (2000), Writing Still: New Stories from Zimbabwe (2003), Women Writing Zimbabwe (2008), Writing Free (2011), and Writing Mystery & Mayhem (2015).
Career
Staunton was born in Southern Rhodesia, which later became Zimbabwe, and studied English literature in the UK. She began her career in publishing in London, where she was employed by John Calder. Following the 1980 Independence of Zimbabwe, she returned there and worked as an editor first for the Department of Culture in the Ministry of Education and Culture, and then on the Curriculum Development Unit in the same Ministry.
Baobab Books
In 1987, Staunton and Hugh Lewin co-founded Baobab Press, "which rapidly acquired a reputation as an exciting literary publisher", and during her 11 years there the company published a range of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children's books, art books and textbooks. Baobab's list included prizewinning work by such authors as Chenjerai Hove (Noma Award for Publishing in Africa) and Shimmer Chinodya (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Africa region), as well as the posthumous work of Dambudzo Marechera, and all of Yvonne Vera's fiction. Baobab also published several collections of poetry, including one by the performance poet, Chirikure Chirikure.
While at Baobab Books, Staunton compiled the first Zimbabwean oral history with narratives of women in the liberation struggle, Mothers of the Revolution. She has said: "I was very fortunate in that my parents taught us to respect people from all walks of life and showed us that what mattered was not money or status but warmth, compassion, humour and integrity – values rooted in self-respect and human dignity.
The public source identifies “Irene Staunton” as zimbabwean publisher, editor, researcher and writer,. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Irene, Staunton and Zimbabwean.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 8, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q88305538. VIAF identifies the subject as 69092951. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990, 2000, 2003 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Irene Staunton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.