BESSIE AMELIA EMERY HEAD

Born 6 July 1937 in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa

Died 17 April 1986 in Serowe, Botswana

Novels, short stories, essays, history

AUTHOR BIO

Bessie Head was Botswana’s most famous writer. She trained as a teacher in Durban and began her writing career in Cape Town in the late 1950s. She continued writing after she moved to Botswana in 1964: Her first published novel, When Rain Clouds Gather, is set in Botswana, as is all her subsequent fiction. She wrote one novel while she was still in South Africa, The Cardinals, published posthumously in 1993. She wrote numerous essays about a wide range of issues; she was also a letter-writer, leaving behind thousands of letters in the archives of the Khama III Memorial Museum in Serowe, Botswana (the Bessie Head Papers). Her full biography by Gillian Stead Eilersen, Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears. Her Life and Writing (Wits University Press, 2007) also contains a complete bibliography.

LINKS

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessie_Head
• http://thuto.org/bhead/html/
• https://sahistory.org.za/people/bessie-amelia-head

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• “The Isolation of ‘Boeta L.’: Atteridgeville in 1964,” New African, vol. 3, no. 2, 1964, pp. 28–29.
• When Rain Clouds Gather, multiple editions, originally published 1968.
• Maru, multiple editions, originally published 1971.
• A Question of Power, multiple editions, originally published 1973.
• The Collector of Treasures: Botswana Village Tales, multiple editions, originally published 1977.
• Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, David Philip, Heinemann, 1981.
• “The Old Iron Cooking Pot of Europe,” LIP from Southern African Women, edited by Susan Brown, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Susan Rosenberg, Ravan, 1983, pp. 5–7.
• A Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga, Ad Donker, 1984.