Canada Reads 2024 runner-up Kudakwashe Rutendo can soon call herself a published novelist.
She signed a book deal with Doubleday Canada for her debut novel, Salt-Slicked, she told CBC Books.
Salt-Slicked does not yet have a release date, and draws from real events that took place on the slave ship Zong.
In November 1781, approximately 130 enslaved Africans were thrown from the ship and drowned so the owners could collect money for insurance. Ten Africans met the same fate, but chose to jump on their own volition. Salt-Slicked focuses on those who jumped.
“What haunted me was this idea that 10 people could volunteer to jump,” Rutendo said. “That you could see a life offered to you and find it wanting and then be able to make decisive action that you don’t accept it. The power that is in that choice is what got me to start writing [Salt-Slicked].”
Rutendo was introduced to the story of the Zong while taking a university class about postcolonialism.
“I wrote the first couple pages — the beginning and ending of the book, which have stayed relatively the same — in that class because it just possessed me,” said Rutendo.
“I just couldn’t stop.”
In the course, she read m. nourbeSe philip’s epic poem Zong!, which explores the legal text of Gregson v. Gilbert, the only public record of this brutality, and gives voice to the people who were murdered.
“The more you research the Zong and the more you tune into what is going on in the world right now, it begins to feel that we’ve never really truly progressed and all the lines of terror, they just connect and continue,” said Rutendo.
But in her research for the novel, Rutendo found hope in the knowledge that throughout history there are always people who will notice when there is injustice and do their best to stop it, even if doesn’t feel like there are that many taking action.
“I found it quite quaint, the idea that even though there might not be change, people can look at something terrible and call it terrible,” she said.
“We all get to share in that: the people who are suffering and the people who realize it and try to do something about that. I found it rather inspiring. So I really wanted, from the onset, for the book to be a story of hope.”
Kudakwashe Rutendo on the set of Canada Reads 2024. She championed Shut Up You’re Pretty by Téa Mutonji. (Joanna Roselli/CBC)
In 2024, Rutendo was a contender for Canada Reads, championing the powerful and visceral short story collection, Shut Up You’re Pretty by Téa Mutonji.
In her 30-second pitch of the book on Commotion ahead of the debates, she said that Shut Up You’re Pretty has “the promise of hope and future, not in spite of a heavy past, but because of it.”
Her novel Salt-Slicked is on a similar vein, never shying away from the horrific truths of the past, while still moving forward with hope.
“We should shepherd our past,” she said. “It doesn’t mean to use it to define you. It doesn’t mean to let it overwhelm you. But I think there’s an essential tie between the past, what we’ve experienced, and how we move forward. And until you take that leap into it, no matter how heavy and beleaguering it is, there’s always part of you that struggles under the lack of acknowledgement.”
There’s an essential tie between the past, what we’ve experienced, and how we move forward.- Kudakwashe Rutendo
Rutendo is an actor from Fort McMurray, Alta., who fell in love with the stage by performing live poetry. Since then, she’s starred in feature films Giving Hope: The Ni’cola Mitchell Story and, most recently, Backspot, a queer cheer drama directed by D.W. Waterson and produced by Elliot Page and Page Boy Productions. She also appeared in an episode of the 2024 television show Tracker.
Rutendo was a judge for the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize. Applications for this year’s prize are now open until Nov. 1.