Date: 14 Jul 2022
Time: 18:00 SAST
Place: The Commune, 14 Reserve street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg
The Commune invites you to an in-person launch of Lauretta Ngcobo Writing as the Practice of Freedom: Selected Writings of Lauretta Ngcobo edited and with an analysis by Barbara Boswell.
Feminist and Pan Africanist Congress member Lauretta Ngcobo’s death in November 2015 robbed South Africa and the African continent of a significant literary talent, freedom fighter, and feminist voice. Ngcobo was one of three pioneering black South African women writers – 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 woman in apartheid South Africa.
Editor: Dr Barbara Boswell is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. She is the author of And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Fiction as Feminism (2020) and Grace: A Novel (2017), winner of the University of Johannesburg Prize for Debut Creative Writing.
Discussant/Facilitator: Makhosazana Xaba is an award-winning multi-genre anthologist and short story writer. Her edited volume Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000 – 2018 (2019) was hailed as an instant classic and won the 2020 Human Social Sciences award. She has published 4 poetry collections and her essays have been anthologised widely.