Sindiwe Magona

For nearly thirty years, Sindiwe Magona has been authoring the lives of South Africans from a broad range of ethnic and economic backgrounds. Her probing and poignant stories, poem, articles, and plays examine the ever-thorny challenges within the apartheid and post-apartheid world. Her first published works, To My Children's Children and Forced To Grow, coming on the cusp of the new Democracy, provide further evidence to the local and global community of the influence of prejudice but not its victory. With a particularly acute perspective of woman's issues in strife-ridden South Africa, Magona's expansive genre of literary works reveal the anguish of the domestic worker who daily beats back the wolf of poverty from her door as found in the award-winning short story collection Living Loving and Lying Awake at Night; the mother attempting to the seemingly insurmountable cultural and linguistic chasm to explain why her son killed an innocent woman in Mother To Mother; the professional woman who battles against the scourge of AIDS brutally seeking access to her bed in Beauty's Gift; or the young Xhosa girl blossoming under the gaze of her dedicated father in her latest novel Chasing the Tails of My Father's Cattle.