Barbara Boswell: Lauretta Ngcobo. Writing as the Practice of Freedom

HUMA Book Lunch

Editor: Barbara Boswell (University of Cape Town, South Africa)  

Introduction: Lauretta Ngcobo (1931–2015) is best known in South African letters for her novels Cross of Gold and And They Didn't Die. Born in 1931 in Ixopo in the then Natal Province, Ngcobo was a pioneering black feminist writer – one of the first to publish novels in English from the particular vantage point of black women. Along with Bessie Head and Miriam Tlali, Ngcobo showed the world, through her fiction, what it was like to be black and a woman in apartheid South Africa.

In addition to publishing creative writing, she was also an essayist, feminist literary critic, and literary historian who published numerous essays on gender in South Africa, what it meant to be a woman in exile, the transition from apartheid to democracy, and her life as a black woman writer. This edited collection publishes her key non-fiction collectively for the first time.

Lauretta Ngcobo: Writing as the Practice of Freedom serves as a mapping of Ngcobo's life and a compilation of some of her key writings. It is edited by Barbara Boswell, who curates selected excerpts of Ngcobo's most significant fiction and non-fiction. The book is part literary biography, part edited collection, with Boswell's framing and analysis of Ngcobo's life and literary works making up the book's first section. Its second section, "Her Voice", comprises a selection of Ngcobo's key essays, fiction and interviews. In part three, "Her Legacy", Boswell surveys what Ngcobo has bequeathed in South African letters. See the book: Lauretta Ngcobo: Writing as the Practice of Freedom (HSRC Press, 2022).

About the editor: Barbara Boswell is a writer and feminist literary scholar who is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Cape Town, where she heads the Department of English Literary Studies. She is the author of Grace: A Novel (2017), winner of the UJ Creative Writing Prize for Debut Fiction, and And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women's Novels as Feminism (2020), shortlisted for the National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) Award, and longlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Literary Award.

Discussant: Sindiswa Busuku, Lecturer and writer, University of Cape Town