Although she lived in Glasgow for 40 years, Zoë Wicomb, who has died aged 76, remained as much a South African as a Scottish writer. Her four novels and two short story collections convey in vibrant prose the dramas and dilemmas, minor as well as major, of life in South Africa during and after the era of apartheid.

In particular, they reflect the experience of the “coloured” communities of the Western Cape in their ambiguous relation to both white and black authority. (Zoë freely used the term “coloured”, which has outlasted apartheid as a neutral epithet.)

The voices that sound so strikingly on her pages, in anger, despair, longing or triumph, are those to be heard on the animated streets of Cape Town and in the coloured settlements to its north.

But Scotland, especially Glasgow, also repeatedly appears in Zoë’s fiction. Her South African characters who find themselves there feel a bewildering mixture of estrangement and familiarity as they encounter remnants of the historic links between the two countries. Zoë herself observed that her voice and appearance always marked her as a stranger in Scotland, and this not-being-at-home undoubtedly contributed to the force of her writing.

Her first book, the set of connected short stories You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, published by Virago in 1987, announced a new presence in South African English literature. The heroine, Frieda Shenton, traces a path similar to her author’s, from a rural coloured community to school and university in Cape Town and then to Britain; she, too, publishes a short story collection. Although the Künstlerroman plot is familiar, the vivid depiction of coloured life, in both village and city, give it an exhilarating freshness.

Of all Zoë’s novels, David’s Story (2000) is perhaps her most ambitious. It combines a present-day story focusing on the tensions within the ANC after the democratic elections, especially the difficult position of coloured cadres in the guerrilla movement, with a historical fiction about the cross-country treks of the Griqua people, the descendants of the indigenous Khoikhoi and the colonial masters. While forcefully depicting the ANC’s internal violence, the novel queries the very process of truth-telling.

The novels that followed, Playing in the Light (2006), October (2014) and Still Life (2020), and the short story collection The One That Got Away (2008) continued Zoë’s exploration of coloured experience, the interrelations of Scotland and South Africa as they impact individual lives, and the challenges of fictional writing. The 2013 award of an inaugural Windham-Campbell prize for achievement in fiction was just one of the many tributes she received. A collection of her academic essays was published by Yale University Press in 2018.

Zoë, the middle child of three, was born near the small Griqua town of Vanrhynsdorp in Namaqualand, South Africa, where her father Robert Wicomb was a teacher. Her mother, Rachel Le Fleur, died when she was a young girl. The only English books in the home, apart from a children’s Bible, were Pride and Prejudice and an abridged David Copperfield, which she read and re-read.

Though the community’s language was Afrikaans, Robert spoke English to her and sent her to an English secondary school in far-away Cape Town. In 1968 she completed a BA at the University College of the Western Cape (an apartheid-era institution for coloured students), then in 1970 moved to England where she undertook a second BA at the University of Reading. That year saw a marriage of convenience to Martin Kaufman, from whom she was divorced some 20 years later.

After graduating in 1973, Zoë began teaching in Nottingham, and in 1976 she met the photographer Roger Palmer, her partner for the rest of her life. The couple rented a farm cottage in Nottinghamshire, where, in 1979, their daughter Hannah was born. They lived there and in Nottingham until 1987, when they moved permanently to Glasgow, Roger having started teaching at the Glasgow School of Art.

She completed a master’s degree at the University of Strathclyde in 1989, and in 1991 began a three-year teaching stint at her Cape Town alma mater, now the University of the Western Cape. On returning to Glasgow, she accepted a teaching position at the University of Strathclyde, where she was later appointed professor of postcolonial literature and creative writing. She and Roger were married in 2006. Retirement from Strathclyde, and emeritus status, followed in 2009.

In many ways, Zoë found the possession of her immense talent a burden. Fictional creation was an excruciating process, and appearing before an audience to give a reading was torture. More than once I had to help her screw up her courage on such an occasion. And yet among friends she was confident, outspoken and always good for a laugh.

She chose small publishers whose commercial practices she approved of, and refused the services of an agent. The publicity machine was anathema to her. As a result, her fiction remains less well-known than it deserves to be, though it is widely taught and written about.

She is survived by Roger, Hannah and her grandchildren Finn, Theo and Milo.

• Zoë Charlotte Wicomb, novelist and academic, born 23 November 1948; died 13 October 2025