Long Story Short: The Writing Life of Sheila Roberts

Abstract

In a publishing career within South Africa dating from the 1970s, over the next three decades, Sheila Roberts (1937–2009) consistently evaded oversimplified readings of her work, especially in the short-story form, and in her verse. For most of her later professional career as a teacher of “creative writing” in the United States, she defied literalisms, dispatching back to her country of birth challenging versions of “home truths” and increasingly using devious narratorial techniques, even in her novels, becoming a major innovator in the literature of the English-speaking subcontinent.

Keywords:

• Roberts
• creative writing
• metafiction
• exile
• South African publishing

Notes on contributor

Stephen Gray, who has regularly contributed to Current Writing since its inception, is an emeritus professor of English of the University of Johannesburg, in which city he resides. His acquaintance with the subject of his article, Sheila Roberts, began once they were some of the editors of IZWE, and continued for the rest of her career, at home and abroad. Gray is a leading poet, novelist, and critic of South African literature.

Notes

1. Personal correspondence between the late Professor Wertheim and the writer over 1990–2001 during which he often expressed his admiration for Roberts’s work and requested information on its reception in South Africa.

2. Other interviews with Sheila Roberts were conducted by Geoff Hughes, whose review of He’s My Brother, in Contrast (no. 43 of Summer, 1977), with quoted passages deleted in favour of blank spaces, includes personal details; and with Craig MacKenzie during the European branch of ACLALS conference held in Nice, France, on 23 March, 1988, and subsequently in the NELM Interview Series, Number 4 (Between the Lines, 1989, 33–55).