Makhosazana Xaba

Makhosazana Xaba (born 10 July 1957) is a South African poet and short-story writer. She trained as a nurse and has worked a women's health specialist in NGOs, as well as writing on gender and health. She is Associate Professor of Practice in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg.

Biography Makhosazana (Khosi) Xaba was born in Greytown, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, to Glenrose Nomvula Mbatha and Rueben Bejanmin Xaba, the second of five children. She has an MA degree in creative writing from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University) and is working on a biography of Noni Jabavu.

Xaba won the Deon Hofmeyr Award for Creative Writing (2005) for her unpublished short story "Running". and Tongues of Their Mothers (2008). A book of her short stories, Running and Other Stories, was published in 2013, and won the 2014 Nadine Gordimer South African Literary Awards Short Story Award.

Xaba is editor of the 2016 anthology Like the Untouchable Wind: An Anthology of Poems, about "the life, experience and visions of African lesbians".

She is also a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

In 2022, Xaba co-edited (with Bhekizizwe Peterson and Khwezi Mkhize) Foundational African Writers, a book of essays celebrating the centenaries of Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es'kia Mphahlele, who were all born in 1919. It was described as "a visionary project" by Carli Coetzee of the Journal of African Cultural Studies and professor Mpalive Msiska stated: "This well-crafted collection recovers the seminal position of four of the most important twenty-first-century African writers who have been absent from the canon and recalibrates the distinctive development of African literature."

With Athambile Masola, Xaba introduced the book Noni Jabavu: A Stranger at Home, a collection of Jabavu's Daily Dispatch columns, published in 2023.

In 2024, Xaba's Zulu-language translation of Frantz Fanon's final book, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), was published as Izimpabanga Zomhlaba by Inkani Books.

Works These Hands: Poems. Timbila Poetry Project, Elim Hospital, Limpopo Province, 2005. Poetry. . Tongues of Their Mothers. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008. Poetry. . Running and Other Stories. Cape Town: Modjaji Books, 2013. Fiction. .

As editor (with Karen Martin) Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction. Johannesburg: MaThoko's Books, 2013. . Like the Untouchable Wind: An Anthology of Poems. Harare: MaThoko's Books, 2016. Poetry anthology. . (with Crystal Biruk) Proudly Malawian: Life Stories from Lesbian and Gender-nonconforming Individuals. Johannesburg: MaThoko's Books, 2016. . (with Karen Martin) Queer Africa 2: New Stories. Johannesburg: MaThoko's Books, 2017. . The Alkalinity of Bottled Water. Botsotso Publishing, 2019. Poetry. Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000-2018. Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press, 2019. . (With Bhekizizwe Peterson and Khwezi Mkhize) Foundational African Writers: Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es'kia Mphahlele. Foreword by Simon Gikandi. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2022. .