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Zoë Wicomb | |
|---|---|
| Born | Zoë Charlotte Wicomb 23 November 1948 Beeswater, Western Cape, South Africa |
| Died | 13 October 2025 (aged 76) Glasgow, Scotland |
| Alma mater | University of the Western Cape; Reading University |
| Occupations |
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| Notable work | You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town |
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Zoë Charlotte Wicomb (23 November 1948 – 13 October 2025) was a South African author and academic who lived in the United Kingdom from the 1970s until her death.[1] Her 1987 debut book, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town – a collection of inter-related short stories, set during the Apartheid era and partly autobiographical – received wide praise, and in 2000 was described by Toni Morrison as "seductive, brilliant and precious".[2]
In 2013, Wicomb was awarded the inaugural Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for her fiction.[3]
Background
Zoë Charlotte Wicomb was born in Beeswater, Western Cape, on 23 November 1948.[4] Growing up in small-town Namaqualand, she went to Cape Town for high school, and attended the University of the Western Cape (which was established in 1960 as a university for "Coloureds").[5][6][7]
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.[8]
In 1994, she moved to Glasgow, Scotland, where she was Professor in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde until her retirement in 2009. She was Professor Extraordinaire at Stellenbosch University from 2005 to 2011. She was also Emeritus Professor at the University of Strathclyde.
Wicomb died at a hospital in Glasgow, Scotland from a pulmonary embolism on 13 October 2025, at the age of 76.[9][4]
Career
Wicomb gained attention in South Africa and internationally with her first book, a collection of inter-related short stories, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), set during the apartheid era. The central character is a young woman brought up speaking English in an Afrikaans-speaking "coloured" community in Little Namaqualand, attending the University of the Western Cape, leaving for England, and authoring a collection of short stories. This work has been compared to V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival.[10]
Her second work of fiction, the novel David's Story (2000), is set partly in 1991 toward the close of the apartheid era and explores the role of coloureds and women in the military wing of the ANC, and the challenges of adjustment to the realities of the "New South Africa". By presenting the novel as the work of an amanuensis creating a narrative out of the scattered statements of the central character, David Dirkse, Wicomb raises questions about the writing of history in a period of political instability, and by relating the stories of the Griqua people from whom Dirkse is, in part (like Wicomb), descended, it exposes the dangers of ethnic exclusiveness. The novel has been studied as a key work dealing with the transition period in South Africa along with Disgrace (1999) by J. M. Coetzee and Bitter Fruit (2001) by Achmat Dangor.[11]
Playing in the Light, Wicomb's second novel, released in 2006, is set in mid-1990s Cape Town and tells the story of Marion Campbell, the daughter of a coloured couple who succeeded in passing for white, as she comes to learn their painful story and to reassess her own place in the world of post-apartheid South Africa.
Wicomb's second collection of short stories, The One That Got Away (2008), is set mainly in Cape Town and Glasgow and explores a range of human relationships: marriage, friendships, family ties and relations with servants. Many of the stories—which are often linked to one another—deal with South Africans in Scotland or Scots in South Africa.
Her third novel, October, was published in 2015; its central character, Mercia Murray, returns from Glasgow to Namaqualand to visit her brother and his family and to face the question of what "home" means. The novel explicitly evokes its connection with Marilynne Robinson's Home, the title Wicomb also wanted for her work.
Wicomb preferred nonprofit presses for her fiction, such as The Feminist Press and The New Press. Her short stories have been published in many collections, including Colours of a New Day: Writing for South Africa (edited by Sarah LeFanu and Stephen Hayward; Lawrence & Wishart, 1990) and Daughters of Africa (edited by Margaret Busby; Jonathan Cape, 1992).
Her latest novel, Still Life, was published in 2020 by The New Press and was selected by The New York Times as one of the ten best historical novels of 2020. The novel has been called stunningly original.[by whom?] Although ostensibly about Thomas Pringle, the so-called Father of South African poetry, the story is told through the prism of characters from the past – West Indian slave, Mary Pringle, whose memoir was published by Pringle; Hinza Marossi, Pringle’s adopted Khoesan son; and Sir Nicholas Greene, a character time travelling from the pages of a book. The novel features the paranormal yet is neither thriller nor mystery; the characters may move in our modern world but their main purpose is to interrogate the past.
Wicomb also published numerous articles of literary and cultural criticism; a selection of these was collected in Race, Nation, Translation: South African essays, 1990–2013 (edited by Andrew van der Vlies; Yale University Press, 2018). Her own fiction has been the subject of numerous essays, three special issues of journals (the Journal of Southern African Studies, Current Writing, and Safundi) and a volume edited by Kai Easton and Derek Attridge, Zoë Wicomb & the Translocal: Scotland and South Africa (Routledge, 2017). Wicomb chaired the judges' panel for the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing.
Her work has been recognised for a number of prizes, including winning the M-Net Prize (for David’s Story) in 2001, being shortlisted in 2009 for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (for The One That Got Away), nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2012, and shortlisted for the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize (for October) in 2015.[12]
Awards and honours
- 2010: Honorary doctorate from the Open University[13]
- 2013: Windham–Campbell Literature Prize.[3] Wicomb's citation states: "Zoë Wicomb's subtle, lively language and beautifully crafted narratives explore the complex entanglements of home, and the continuing challenges of being in the world."[14]
- 2016: Honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Cape Town[15]
- 2022: Honorary doctorate from the University of the Western Cape in recognition of her academic and creative contributions[16][17]
Selected bibliography
Books
- You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town. London: Virago Press. 1987. (short stories).
- Reprints: The Feminist Press, 2000; Umuzi, 2008.
- David's Story, Kwela, 2000; The Feminist Press, 2001 (novel).
- Playing in the Light, Umuzi, 2006; The New Press, 2008, ISBN 978-1595582218 (novel).
- The One That Got Away, Random House-Umuzi, 2008; The New Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1595584571; second edition, Five Leaves Publications, 2011, ISBN 978-1907869044 (short stories).
- October, The New Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1595589620 (novel).
- Race, Nation, Translation: South African essays, 1990–2013 (ed. Andrew van der Vlies), Yale University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0-30022-617-1, and Wits University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-1-77614-324-5 (essays).[18]
- Still Life, Penguin Random House, South Africa, 2020. ISBN 9781415210536 (novel).
Essays and other contributions
- "To Hear the Variety of Discourses", in "Current Writing: Text and Reception in South Africa". Volume 2 No 1. 1990. 35–44.
- "Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa", in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (eds), Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91–107.
- "Setting Intertextuality and the Resurrection of the Postcolonial", Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41(2), November 2005:144–155.
- Wicomb, Zoë (16 December 2013). "Nelson Mandela". The Talk of the Town. Postscript. The New Yorker. Vol. 89, no. 41. p. 27.
References
- Neel Mukherjee, "Homing instinct: October by Zoë Wicomb", New Statesman, 26 June 2014.
- de Waal, Shaun (15 October 2025). "OBITUARY | Zoë Wicomb 1948-2025: The author who captured South Africa's shadows and light". news24.com. Retrieved 16 October 2025.
- Dorie Baker (4 March 2013). "Yale awards $1.35 million to nine writers". YaleNews. Retrieved 5 March 2013.
- Chao, Rebecca (31 October 2025). "Zoë Wicomb, Acclaimed South African Author, Dies at 76". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 November 2025.
- "UWC History". University of the Western Cape. Archived from the original on 28 February 2013. Retrieved 28 October 2025.
- Attridge, Derek (28 October 2025). "Zoë Wicomb obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 28 October 2025.
- Wicomb, Zoe. "Zoe Wicomb A Writer Of Rare Brilliance" (Interview). Interviewed by Robinson, David. Intermix. Retrieved 28 October 2025.
- de Beer, Diane (31 October 2020). "Reluctant Author Zoë Wicomb Gets It Right Time After Time With A Story Of Its Time". De Beer Necessities. Retrieved 3 June 2024.
- "SA literary icon, Zoë Wicomb passes away at 77". eNCA. 14 October 2025.
- Donnelly, K. (2014). "Metafictions of development: The Enigma of Arrival, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, and the place of the world in world literature", Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 49(1), 63–80.
- Gready, Paul. 2008. "Culture, Testimony, and the Toolbox of Transitional Justice", Peace Review 20, no. 1: 41–48.
- Joan Hambidge, "The uncompromising Zoë Wicomb", Africa is a Country.
- "Honorary graduate cumulative list 2017" (PDF). The Open University. 2017. Retrieved 28 October 2025.
- "Zoë Wicomb". Windham Campbell Prizes. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Archived from the original on 28 September 2018. Retrieved 28 October 2025.
- "Honorary degrees awarded, 2016". University of Cape Town. Archived from the original on 4 March 2018. Retrieved 28 October 2025.
- Moolla, Fiona (14 October 2025). "In Memoriam: Professor Zoë Wicomb". uwc.ac.za. University of the Western Cape. Retrieved 16 October 2025.
- Rhoda, Angelica (15 October 2025). "Remembering Zoë Wicomb: Novelist who reshaped SA narratives". CapeTownETC. Retrieved 16 October 2025.
- Race, Nation, Translation Archived 25 January 2019 at the Wayback Machine at Wits University Press.
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Zoë Wicomb, an award-winning South African author who wrote from self-exile in Scotland and drew global praise for fiction that rendered with nuance and wit the life of mixed-race people like herself during and after apartheid, died on Oct. 13 in Glasgow. She was 76.
Her death, at a hospital, was caused by a pulmonary embolism, said her husband, Roger Palmer.
Ms. Wicomb (pronounced WICK-um) grew up in a desert-like region of arid scrubland, within a country that enforced racial discrimination through law and terror. She left South Africa in 1970, she said, to put “the whole oppressiveness” she’d felt far behind her, and settled in Britain. She taught secondary school before embarking on an acclaimed literary career in her 30s.
Her body of work was compact — four novels, two short-story collections and a book of essays — but she nevertheless became, the South African author and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee wrote in an email, “the most significant of the writers who quit South Africa in the 1970s to get away from the grinding pressures of apartheid.”
“From her eyrie in Scotland, yet with roots deep in pre-colonial Africa,” Mr. Coetzee wrote, “she explored in one book after another the modalities of South African experience, in language whose wit and irony masked a deep seriousness.”
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Ms. Wicomb’s first book, “You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town,” was published in 1987 and garnered enthusiastic reviews. The American author and future Nobel laureate Toni Morrison offered a book-jacket blurb describing her work as “seductive, brilliant” and noting that “her talent glitters.” In a review for The New York Times, the novelist Bharati Mukherjee called her a “sophisticated storyteller who combines the open-endedness of contemporary fiction with the force of autobiography and the simplicity of family stories.”
A collection of loosely connected stories, “Cape Town” offers scenes from the life of Frieda Shenton, a mixed-race girl growing up under apartheid, from childhood to young adulthood. Despite the city’s breadth, the world available to Frieda is constrained to segregated sections of trains and buses and unpaved sides of the road. As the novel’s title wryly suggests, in a way she cannot get lost in Cape Town.
At one point, Frieda describes a longing “for the veld of my childhood,” where geographical landmarks “blaze their permanence.” “Plump little buttocks of cacti squat as if lifting the skirts to pee, and the swollen fingers of vygies burst in clusters out of the stone, pointing the way,” Frieda observes. “In the veld you can always find your way home.”
Ms. Wicomb’s first novel, “David’s Story,” published in 2000, is set during South Africa’s transition out of apartheid. The main character, David Dirkse, a leader in the military arm of the previously outlawed African National Congress, is disoriented in the new political era. As he sets out to uncover the history of his mixed-raced ancestors known as the Griquas, he finds himself on a hit list, possibly by embittered former colleagues or maybe by newer acquaintances.
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The novel, Mr. Coetzee assessed at the time, was “beholden to no one in its politics” and “a huge step in the remaking of the South Africa novel.”
In 2013, Yale University awarded Ms. Wicomb the inaugural Windham Campbell Literature Prize for fiction, which came with a $150,000 purse.
“The challenge,” she said of her aims as a novelist in an interview that year with the website 2paragraphs, “is to capture marginal voices, thus not only a matter of my voice but, rather, one of polyphony, the many different, even contradictory, voices that engage with each other.”
“My project,” she added, “includes the recovery of minor, neglected or disparaged peoples and events.”
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Zoë Charlotte Wicomb was born in Beeswater, in the Western Cape province, on Nov. 23, 1948, a few months after apartheid was formalized as government policy. She was the middle of three children of Robert Wicomb, a village schoolteacher and sheep farmer, and Rachel le Fleur, the daughter of a Griqua chief.
Afrikaans, the language of Dutch colonizers, was predominantly spoken in the region, but she told the newspaper The Scotsman in 2006 that her parents were committed to teaching her English so she would have a better chance in life than working in the region’s mines or as a domestic servant.
She wore out the only two works of English-language fiction available to her at home, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist.” “I still love both,” Ms. Wicomb said in a 2017 interview for the website the Bookseller. “I was transported from the vulgarity of apartheid by books — books opened up different worlds, and brought freedom from an oppressive social order.”
She was around 13 when her mother died, and she was sent to live with an aunt to attend high school in a suburb of Cape Town. In 1968, she received a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of the Western Cape, which at the time was a segregated school. She said she was exposed to a larger canon of Western literary masterpieces, including works by Shakespeare and Chaucer, but life under apartheid remained suffocating.
“I had never been to a theater, seen an art film, or come across any Black writing before I went abroad,” she said in an interview with the scholar Andrew van der Vlies, who edited her 2018 collection, “Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays, 1990-2013.”
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After arriving in England, Ms. Wicomb said she was shocked by the overt racism she initially experienced. “At least with apartheid, one always knew one’s place,” she often remarked, according to Mr. Palmer. She taught at secondary schools while working toward a bachelor’s degree from the University of Reading in 1979. A decade later, she received a master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.
In what she described as a marriage of convenience after South Africa revoked her passport, she married a gay British friend, Martin Kaufman, in 1972, so she could more easily obtain a British passport for return visits to her home country.
She and Mr. Kaufman technically remained married until 2005. She filed for divorce that year so she could wed Mr. Palmer, an artist whom she first met in 1976 and with whom she had a daughter, Hannah. Her husband and daughter survive her, as do a brother, Neil, and three grandsons.
Ms. Wicomb followed Mr. Palmer for his teaching career, first to Nottingham, England, and then to Glasgow in 1987. Meanwhile, her discovery of other novelists who were women of color and from southern Africa, notably Bessie Head, inspired her to start writing.
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Reading Ms. Head, she said, “gave me the courage or perhaps permission to write.”
She taught English and creative writing at the University of Strathclyde from 1994 to 2012 and also taught at universities in South Africa. She continued to dissect themes of dislocation and identity in a post-apartheid South Africa in two more novels — “Playing in the Light” (2006) and “October” (2014) — and a short-story collection, “The One That Got Away” (2008), set in Cape Town and Glasgow.
Her last novel, “Still Life” (2020), chosen by The Times as one of the 10 best historical novels of the year, examined the life of Thomas Pringle, the Scottish-born 19th-century writer often described as the English-language father of South African poetry.
As an author, Ms. Wicomb said she valued her independence and wanted to let her work stand on its own merit without public-relations machinery. She preferred working with small literary presses, avoided using literary agents and rarely granted interviews. She said her writing was a way to reconcile feeling like an émigré longing for but disconnected from her homeland.
“In my privileged position, I don’t have the right to be quibbling about what home is and where home is,” she told The Buenos Aires Herald in 2015. “Let’s say I’ve got two homes, let’s look at it not in terms of lack, let’s stop thinking about it as a problem. I can enjoy both places.”
