Although she lived in Glasgow for 40 years, Zoë Wicomb, who has died aged 76, remained as much a South African as a Scottish writer. Her four novels and two short story collections convey in vibrant prose the dramas and dilemmas, minor as well as major, of life in South Africa during and after the era of apartheid.
In particular, they reflect the experience of the “coloured” communities of the Western Cape in their ambiguous relation to both white and black authority. (Zoë freely used the term “coloured”, which has outlasted apartheid as a neutral epithet.)
