Running and other stories

Turning her back on what is considered conventional, Makhosazana Xaba engages with her subject-matter on a revolutionary level in Running and Other Stories. She takes tradition – be that literary tradition, cultural tradition, gender tradition – and re-imagines it in a way that is liberating and innovative. Bracketed by Xaba’s revisitings of Can Themba’s influential short story, The Suit, the ten stories in this collection, while strongly independent, are in conversation with one another, resulting in a collection that can be devoured all at once or savoured slowly, story by story. By re-envisioning the ordinary and accepted, Xaba is creating a space in which women’s voices are given a rebirth.

Author Biography

Makhosazana Xaba is a Writing Fellow at the Wits School of Public Health working on a book on the history of nursing in South Africa. She has published two collections of poetry: these hands and Tongues of their Mothers. Her poetry has been translated into Mandarin and Italian and published in China and Italy. Her long term project is a biography of a South African woman writer Helen Nontando (Noni) Jabavu. In 2005 Makhosazana won the Deon Hofmeyr Award for Creative Writing for her then unpublished short story, Running. She holds an MA in Writing (with distinction) from Wits University. Running and other stories is her first collection of short stories.