Rose Zwi (8 May 1928 – 22 October 2018) was a Mexican-born South African–Australian writer and anti-apartheid activist best known for her work about the immigrants in South Africa.

Biography

Zwi was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, to Jewish refugees from Lithuania who arrived in 1926 from Žagarė, and her family moved to South Africa when she was a young girl. In 1967 Zwi graduated from the University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) with a BA (Hons) in English literature.^[1][2] While living in South Africa, she was part of the white anti-apartheid organization Black Sash.^[1]

Zwi lived briefly in Israel, but returned to South Africa until 1988 when she relocated to Australia. She became an Australian citizen in 1992 and lived in Sydney, New South Wales. She visited her parents' hometown, Žagarė, in 2006.^[3]

She died in 2018 in Sydney, at the age of 90.^[1]

Another Year in Africa

Another Year in Africa is set in a fictional town of Mayfontein, near Johannesburg in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The novel is a chronicle of exile, alienation and assimilation centering the Jewish community of Lithuanian descent.^[4]

Awards

• 1982 – Winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize for Another Year in Africa – a prize for new and emerging writers^[5]
• 1982 – Mofolo-Plomer Prize for an unpublished novel (The Umbrella Tree)^[6]
• 1994 – Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Fiction Award for Safe Houses^[7]

Works

Bibliography

• Claudia Bathsheba Braude, Contemporary Jewish Writing in South Africa: An Anthology, University of Nebraska, 2001
• Elizabeth le Roux, Publishing against Apartheid South Africa, A Case Study of Ravan Press, Cambridge University Press, 2020

References

• Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature