When Lauretta Ngcobo died in 2015, Africa lost a significant literary talent, freedom fighter, and feminist voice. Ngcobo was one of the pioneering writers who first published novels in English from the vantage point of black women. Along with Bessie Head and Miriam Tlali, she showed the world, through her fiction, what it was like to be a black woman in apartheid South Africa.

Barbara Boswell deftly traces Ngcobo’s life, presents excerpts from her literary work, and assesses the nature of her enduring legacy.