Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
A stunningly original novel exploring race, truth in authorship, and the legacy of past exploitation, from the Windham-Campbell lifetime achievement award winner
“Timely and thought-provoking, Still Life is a novel about the complexities of human compassion and the impermanence of legacies.” —Foreword Reviews
When Zoë Wicomb burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, she was hailed by her literary contemporaries and reviewers alike. Since then, her carefully textured writing has cemented her reputation as being among the most distinguished twenty-first-century writers of international fiction.
Wicomb’s majestic novel Still Life juggles our perceptions of time and reality, telling the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet Thomas Pringle, whose only legacy is in South Africa where he is dubbed the “Father of South African Poetry.”
In her efforts to resurrect Pringle, the fictional biographer summons the spirit of Mary Prince, the West Indian slave; Hinza, Pringle’s adopted black South African son; and seasoned time traveler (and a character from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando) Sir Nicholas Green, all of them joining the author to help her write her book. Their adventures, as they travel across space and time to unlock the mysteries of Pringle’s life, offer a poignant exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.
“Timely and thought-provoking, Still Life is a novel about the complexities of human compassion and the impermanence of legacies.”
—Foreword Reviews
“A virtuosic metafictional biography. . . . Wicomb’s experiment succeeds by exploring the question of who gets to write history.”
—Publishers Weekly
“An intriguingly metatextual novel that addresses some of the silences and omissions of South African history, and the broader relationship of historiography, reputation, writing and memory to power.”
—Simon Lewis, The Post and Courier
Zoë Wicomb (1948–2025) was a South African writer living in Glasgow, Scotland, where she was emeritus professor at the University of Strathclyde. She is the author of October, The One That Got Away, and Playing in the Light, all published by The New Press, as well as You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and David’s Story. She was an inaugural winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize in fiction.