Foreword

Summary

I Write the Yawning Void is a collection of essays by the celebrated South African writer, storyteller and activist, Sindiwe Magona. Known for her many contributions to a wide range of literary genres (autobiographies, short stories, plays, novels, poems, biographies and children's books), she has received less attention for the essays she has penned over the course of her career. Magona began to engage in expository writing with an article for the New Internationalist magazine in 1992, two years after she published her first full-length work, the autobiography To My Children's Children. She went on to publish other short prose pieces in this journal and in a variety of other venues, even as she was taking on one literary genre after another and establishing a name for herself in South African letters.

Today, Magona is well recognised as one of the country's most significant writers and a seminal figure in South African women's writing. She has received more than twenty awards since she began writing – most notably, the Xhosa Heroes Award in 1997 (which recognises those who work to uplift their communities); the Proclamation Award from New York State in 2003 (for her artistic work on the issues of HIV and Aids); the South African Molteno Gold Medal in 2007 (for her role in promoting isiXhosa); the Italian Premio Grinzane Terre D’Otrantro in 2007 (for writing that promotes dialogue between people); the Presidential Order of Ikhamanga in 2011 for outstanding achievement in literature and playwriting (the highest such award in South Africa); the Mbokodo Award for Creative Writing in 2012 (which she shared with Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer); as well as the English Academy of Southern Africa Gold Medal Award in 2016 and the André Brink Award in 2018, both of which pay tribute to her oeuvre. In addition, Magona has been awarded four honorary doctorates (from Hartwick College in the USA and also from Rhodes University, Nelson Mandela University and Fort Hare University in South Africa), and she completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of the Western Cape in 2022. In addition, she is among the list of ‘Living Legends’, a programme created by the South African Government's Department of Arts and Culture.

Given Magona's stature as a revered spokesperson for women and for marginalised people in general, a publication which gathers her most important essays into a single collection is both fitting and timely.