Sindiwe Magona – who turns 80 this year – is a celebrated South African writer, storyteller, speaker and activist. In 2022 Magona, once a domestic worker, received her PhD in creative writing. Best known for her novels, autobiographies, short stories, poems and children’s books, she’s also a writer of essays. Now a new collection, I Write the Yawning Void, has been published. The essays in the book mostly deal with becoming and being a writer in a country like South Africa with a violent past that lives on in painful social and economic inequality. We asked her about the book.
What’s the “yawning void” you refer to?
The void or gap is the invisible but loud and tangible conversation that does not take place in our country. What is stopping us from realising the dream of being the “rainbow nation”, to use Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s now world-famous term? In the
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