You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town – Zoë Wicomb

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About
From the blurb:

“Zoë Wicomb’s complex and deeply evocative You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town is among the most distinguished works of recent South African women’s fiction. It is also among the only works of fiction that explored, in the nineteen-eighties already, the experience of coloured people in apartheid South Africa.

In a timeless narrative constructed of vivid episodes that span almost thirty years in the protagonist’s life, it details Frieda Shenton’s coming of age as a woman, and as a writer. It is only as Frieda finds the courage to tell her ‘terrible stories’ – working through her tangled feelings for her family, her heritage, her country and her art – that she can at last begin to create her own place in the world where she has always felt herself an exile.”

About the Author
From Goodreads:

“Zoë Wicomb attended the University of the Western Cape, and after graduating left South Africa for England in 1970, 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. She gained attention in South Africa and internationally with her first work, a collection of short stories, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), which takes place during the apartheid era. Her second novel, David’s Story (2002), takes place in 1991 toward the close of the apartheid era and uses the ambiguous classification of coloureds to explore racial identity. Playing in the Light, her third novel, released in 2006, covers similar terrain conceptually, though this time set in contemporary South Africa and centering around a white woman who learns that her parents were actually coloured. She published her second collection of short stories, The One That Got Away. The stories, set mainly in Cape Town and Glasgow, explore a range of human relationships: marriage, friendships, family ties or relations with servants.

She was a winner of the 2013 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction.

Zoë Wicomb resides in Glasgow where she teaches creative writing and post-colonial literature at the University of Strathclyde.”