The University of the Western Cape (UWC) mourns the passing of Professor Zoë Charlotte Wicomb – one of the most significant authors of late-apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. She is the most accomplished and celebrated novelist and short-story writer ever to have been a student at our university. 

Professor Wicomb, born in Namaqualand in 1948, was among the first generation of students at UWC, in the same class as our late Rector, Prof. Brian O’Connell. Her much admired and widely read short story collection You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) is a semi-autobiographical account of her early years at UWC. Due to the political situation in South Africa, she left for the UK in the 1970s to pursue postgraduate studies, eventually gaining her PhD. After the end of apartheid, she came back to UWC to take up a lectureship in the English Department, but later returned to the UK, where she taught at the University of Strathclyde until her retirement as Professor Emerita. 

Professor Zoë Charlotte Wicomb. Image: Supplied

Prof Wicomb’s life and work spanned continents, but her writing remained deeply rooted in the complexities of South African life. Her creative and critical work chronicled and interrogated the enduring effects of apartheid and colonialism, and offered a fearless critique of post-apartheid nationalism. Her writing was both intimate and expansive, illuminating the personal and political with rare insight. She gave voice to the silences of history and challenged the narratives that sought to simplify South Africa’s complex realities. Besides her famous early short story collection, she wrote the novels David’s Story (2000), Playing in the Light (2006), October (2014), and Still Life (2023). Her novels have received multiple awards, including the prestigious Donald Windham–Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize awarded by Yale University in 2013, the most significant international recognition of her work. 

Her long relationship with UWC was marked by mutual respect and admiration. In recognition of her creative and academic achievements, and her deep links to the institution, the university awarded an honorary doctorate to her in 2022, recognising her principled engagement with the social and cultural life of the nation. Her distinctive and life-enhancing work continues to be studied by undergraduate and postgraduate students at UWC, and it resonates widely with students, scholars, and readers across the globe. 

Professor Robert Balfour, UWC’s Vice-Chancellor, expressed his profound sadness at the news of her passing: "I had the opportunity to meet with Zoe who visited for a Time of the Writer Festival in the early 2000s, and then kept in touch by visiting her and her partner in Glasgow. Her lively interest in South Africa and her deep concern with equality, inclusion and diversity, featured with such nuance, skill and wit in her writing and conversation, and remain powerful in memory."

We extend our deepest condolences to her family, friends, colleagues, and the broader literary community. Prof Wicomb’s legacy will endure in the pages she wrote, the minds she shaped, and the truths she dared to tell.

May she rest in peace.

Professor Fiona Moolla
Dean: Faculty of Arts and Humanities
University of the Western Cape