This site includes brief biographies and bibliographies on well known contemporary African writers along with links to other sites of interest.

BIOGRAPHY
Bessie Head (1937-1986) was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the daughter of a racially mixed marriage. She was taken from her white mother and raised by foster parents until she was thirteen, and then placed in an orphanage. She overcame this difficult childhood and trained to be a primary-school teacher.

After four years as a teacher, two years as a journalist, and a failed marriage in South Africa, she emigrated to Botswana where she lived for many years in deep poverty. She spent fifteen years in a refugee community at the Bamangwato Development Farm before winning Botswanian citizenship. At the development farm, she continued her distinguished career as a writer, though she had to plead for small advances from her publisher in order to buy paper to write on. Her writing brought her recognition and prominence, and she represented Botswana at international writers' conferences in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. She died of hepatitis at age forty-nine.

Along with several collections of short stories, she published three novels and two historical chronicles of African life. In an interview, Head acknowledged "that the regularity of her life in the refugee community brought her the peace of mind she sought: 'In South Africa, all my life I lived in shattered little bits. All those shattered bits began to grow together here.... I have a peace against which all the turmoil is worked out!'"