Call Me Woman

The autobiography of a 72-year-old black South African Woman who has seen and been a part of her country's political history for the last fifty years. Winner of South Africa's CNS Literary Award (1987). "Among that small group of books that have entered into my consciousness and changed my frame of reference."-- San Francisco Chronicle

Bessie Head, one of Africa's best known writers, was born in South Africa but spent much of her life in Botswana. She died tragically early, in 1986, leaving behind her a fine collection of literary works. Tales of Tenderness and Power was the first of her works to be published after her death, and another anthology, A Woman Alone, has also been published posthumously. Both these titles reinforce Bessie Head's literary achievements, already evident in her novels Maru, When Rain clouds Gather, The Cardinals, A Collector of Treasures, A Question of Power, and her historical account Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, which are all available in the Heinemann African Writer Series.

Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), the recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in a small South African town. Her first book, a collection of stories, was published when she was in her early twenties. Her ten books of stories include "Something Out There "(1984), and "Jump and Other Stories" (1991). Her novels include "The Lying Days" (1953), "A World of Strangers" (1958), "Occasion for Loving" (1963), "The Late Bourgeois World "(1966), "A Guest of Honour" (1971), "The Conservationist" (1975), "Burger's Daughter" (1979), "July's People" (1981), "A Sport of Nature" (1987), "My Son's Story" (1990), "None to Accompany Me" (1994), "The House Gun" (1998), "The Pickup" (2001), "Get a Life" (2005), and "No Time Like the Present "(2012). "A World of Strangers", " The Late Bourgeois World", and "Burger's Daughter" were originally banned in South Africa. She published three books of literary and political essays: "The Essential Gesture" (1988); "Writing and Being" (1995), the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures she gave at Harvard in 1994; and "Living in Hope and History" (1999).

Ms. Gordimer was a vice president of PEN International and an executive member of the Congress of South African Writers. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in Great Britain and an honorary member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was also a Commandeur de'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France). She held fourteen honorary degrees from universities including Harvard, Yale, Smith College, the New School for Social Research, City College of New York, the University of Leuven in Belgium, Oxford University, and Cambridge University.

Ms. Gordimer won numerous literary awards, including the Booker Prize for "The Conservationist", both internationally and in South Africa.