| Lauretta Ngcobo |
| Lifetime Achievement Literary Award |
| Novelist and essayist Lauretta Ngcobo was born in 1931, raised and in the Ixopo district of southern Natal , and educated at Fort Hare (BA 1953). Lauretta Ngcobo’s late husband, AB Ngcobo, a founder executive member of the Pan Africanist Congress, was detained in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. In 1963 she left South Africa , escaping imminent arrest, and went into exile with her husband and children, first in Swaziland , then Zambia and finally settling in England where she worked as a teacher for 25 years.The rural community of Ixopo, where she was born and brought up, is described in her most recent novel, And They Didn’t Die. She praises the unsung heroines, the rural women, whose struggles and complexities in harsh environments were further compounded by having to deal with the hardships of apartheid.
Lauretta Ngcobo is the author of Cross-of Gold (1981), Let It Be Told: black women writers in Britain (1987), And They Didn’t Die (1990) and Fikile learns to like other people (1994). In 2006 she was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Literary Award by the South African Literary Awards, a project of the wRite associates in partnership with the national Department of Arts and Culture and Sowetan. |
