AND WROTE MY STORY ANYWAY, Black South African women's novels as feminism

230pp., paperback, Johannesburg, 2020

Examines how ten black female South African writers - Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christiansë, Kagiso Lesego Molope and Zukiswa Wanner - engage with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy in their novels.

"What becomes possible in fiction by Black South African women? In this study, Barbara Boswell brilliantly reads novels by Miriam Tlali, Zoë Wicomb, Zukiswa Wanner, Kagiso Molope and others, and threads them into a transnational feminist literary conversation in which South African writing takes its rightful place. The result is a necessary and illuminating study which will become required reading in Literature and Women’s Studies classes across the globe. I read it hungrily and with gratitude." Gabeba Baderoon, poet and Associate Professor, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African Studies, Pennsylvania State University

 "In And Wrote My Story Anyway Barbara Boswell offers a passionate, often intensely personal, always persuasive engagement with an important genealogy of Black South African women writers, extending from Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo to Zukiswa Wanner and Kagiso Molope. Taking her inspiration from Bessie Head’s declaration that writing opens spaces of resistance and recovery, Boswell’s series of paired readings demonstrate the writers’ powerful contributions to discourses of family, race and nation, and their reframing of female subjectivity. And Wrote My Story Anyway draws their work decisively out of the critical shadows." Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, Oxford University

Barbara Boswell is Associate Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. She is the author of Grace: A Novel (2017), which won the 2018 University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for Creative Writing.