Still Life

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.