Zoe Wicomb
| Zoë Wicomb | |
|---|---|
| Born |
23 November 1948 Western Cape, South Africa |
| Occupation | Writer and academic |
| Notable work | You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town |
Zoë Wicomb (born 23 November 1948 ) is 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.
Zoë Wicomb was born near Vanrhynsdorp, Western Cape, in South Africa. Growing up in small-town Namaqualand, she went to Cape Town for high school, and attended the University of the Western Cape.
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.
Since 1994 she has lived in Glasgow, where she was, until her retirement in 2009, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. She was Professor Extraordinaire at Stellenbosch University from 2005 to 2011. She is now Emeritus Professor at the University of Strathclyde.
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 and partly autobiographical, as 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.
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