Ms Makhosazana Xaba

Makhosazana Xaba is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study in responsible for conceptualising, designing and facilitating the Creative Writing Workshop for emerging writers. She is an award-winning anthologist and short story writer, as well as an essayist and a poet with four collections, the most recent being The Art of Waiting for Tales: Found Poetry from Grace - a novel - .

Izimpabanga Zomhlaba is Xaba’s 2024 isiZulu translation of Frantz Fanon’s 1961 global classic The Wretched of the Earth. Her 2019 edited anthology Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets: 2000 – 2018, was hailed as an instant classic and a co-winner of the 2021 HSS Awards.

In 2004 Xaba pioneered archival research and writing on Noni Jabavu while studying towards the MA in Creative Writing at Wits University and subsequently published numerous biographical essays on Jabavu. In 2022 she co-edited Foundational African Writers: Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi with Bhekizizwe Peterson and Khwezi Mkhize. In 2023 she introduced Noni Jabavu: A Stranger at Home (a compilation of Jabavu’s 1977 weekly columns for the Daily Dispatch newspaper), with Athambile Masola.

In 2014 Xaba’s coedited anthology Queer Africa: New and Collected Stories won the Lambda Awards, becoming the first book from the African continent to win a Lambda.

Rhodes University and University of Pretoria conferred honorary doctorates on Xaba in 2022 and 2025 respectively, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the struggle against apartheid, literature, feminist thought and cultural activism in South Africa.