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Zoë Wicomb Quotes
1948–2025 South Africa
Zoë Wicomb (23 November 1948 – October 2025) was a South African-Scottish author and academic who has lived in the UK since the 1970s. In 2013, she was awarded the inaugural Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for her fiction.
South Africa Academics Authors Novelists Short story writers Also known as: Zoe Wicomb
Random Zoë Wicomb quote
6 quotes
I have a ghost existence here: my whole intellectual and emotional life is in South Africa.
I was hot-headed, impatient, I just wanted to leave the whole oppressiveness of my own culture far behind.
The newspapers were always full of stories about abandoned children found tied up or living under the bed because their families were ashamed of them on account of the colour of their skin.
On the other hand, when I was at school, I remember kids in my class boasting about the members of their family who had 'turned white'.
After several false starts, self-reflexivity offered a solution –– I decided to exploit my inability to write, to fictionalise the writer herself, and to make the actual writing of Pringle’s history the framework of the novel.
I imagined that when I retired from teaching, I would live mainly in South Africa, but in the meantime the promise of liberation has been hollowed out and I’m not attracted to the pathologies of historical colonialism that persist. Still, I do spend a couple of months every year in the Cape and return to the north with great reluctance.