'Bosadi' tears open silent wounds of womanhood

AWARD-winning author and medical doctor Kopano Matlwa has returned to the literary scene with Bosadi, a novel that confronts the unseen and unspoken pain of being a woman in a world that often refuses to see it.

- LUTHO PASIYA

Through the intertwined lives of two women, Matlwa once again proves her gift for illuminating the private battles fought in the name of survival and dignity.

Matlwa is no stranger to tackling difficult questions. Her debut novel, Coconut, which won the 2006/2007 European Union Literary Award, became a modern classic, offering a piercing look at identity and race in post-apartheid South Africa.

She followed it with Spilt Milk and Period Pain, both of which interrogated the contradictions of the “Born Free” generation while examining race, class and the lingering weight of colonisation.

In 2010, she received the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, cementing her place among the continent’s most important contemporary voices.

A trained medical doctor with a Master's in Global Health Science and a doctorate in Population Health from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, Matlwa brings a rare depth of empathy and intellect to her fiction.

Her writing moves between the clinical and the emotional, blending the precision of observation with the poetry of pain.