Zoe wicomb biography

Zoë Wicomb (born 23 November 1948) is a.
Wicomb is an author and educator who is best known for the short story collection You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987).
On 23 November 1948, South African-Scottish author and academic Zoë Wicomb was born near Vanrhynsdorp, Western Cape, in South Africa.

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Wicomb, Zoë 1948–

South African short story writer and novelist.

INTRODUCTION

Wicomb is an author and educator who is best known for the short story collection You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987). Written during her self-imposed twenty-year exile from her native South Africa, the semi-autobiographical work is a collection of connected stories featuring mixed-race South Africans—called "coloured" by the apartheid government—and their lives and experiences somewhere between white and black society. Wicomb, who was herself labeled "coloured," writes out of her own experience as a black woman from South Africa, depicting her characters' search for identity amid the discrimination and the racial ambiguity they experience as members of the "coloured" community. Wicomb has also published two novels, David's Story (2001) and Playing in the Light (2006).

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Wicomb was born in 1948 in rural Little Namaqualand, in a Griqua community in South Africa's Cape Province (now the Western Cape of South Africa). Her mother, Rachel Le Fleur, died when Wicomb was a

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Zoë Wicomb

On 23 November 1948, South African-Scottish author and academic Zoë Wicomb was born near Vanrhynsdorp, Western Cape, in South Africa. In 2013, she was awarded the inaugural Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for her fiction.

Growing up in Namaqualand, Wicomb went to Cape Town for high school, and attended the University of the Western Cape. After graduating, she left South Africa in 1970 for England, where she continued her studies at Reading University. She lived in Nottingham and Glasgow and returned to South Africa in 1990, where she taught for three years in the department of English at the University of the Western Cape. In 1994 she moved to Glasgow, Scotland, where she was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde until her retirement in 2009. She was Professor Extraordinaire at Stellenbosch University from 2005 to 2011.

Wicomb is best known for the short story collection 'You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town' (1987). This semi-autobiographical work is a collection of connected stories featuring mixed-race

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Zoë Wicomb

Still Life

A novel that looks at colonial legacy and issues of contemporary authorship, Zoë Wicomb‘s novel Still Life concerns the attempt of an author to write a biography of 19th century poet and abolitionist Thomas Pringle, sometimes known as the father of South African poetry. In her efforts to resurrect Pringle however, the writer summons the spectre of the former slave Mary Prince, who in 1831 became the first known woman to relate a slave narrative, The History of Mary Prince — a book that was edited and published by Pringle. Also summoned are Hinza, Pringle’s adopted black South African son, and Sir Nicholas Green, self-regarding poet from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. In the following extract from the book, published by Peninsula Press, these competing voices begin to vie for control of the text.

Anyone with a South African education knows his story, or ought to know. But it may help to rehearse with objectivity the bare bones of that history and clarify his relationship with Mary and the young man, Hinza. Many a dictation has fou