Zoë Wicomb

Who is Zoë Wicomb?

Zoë Wicomb is a South African author resident in Scotland.

She attended the University of the Western Cape, and after graduating left South Africa for England in 1970, 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.

She gained attention in South Africa and internationally with her first work, a collection of short stories, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, which takes place during the apartheid era. Her second novel, David's Story, takes place in 1991 toward the close of the apartheid era and explores racial identity. Playing in the Light, her third novel, released in 2006, covers similar terrain conceptually. It is set in mid-1990s Cape Town and centers around the theme of racial passing. Her second collection of short stories, The One That Got Away, is set mainly in Cape Town and Glasgow and explores a range of human relationships: marriage, friendships, family ties and relations with servants.

Zoë Wicomb resides in Glasgow, where she teaches creative writing and post-colonial literature at the University of Strathclyde.