Flown Away: Eva Bezwoda’s Life, Death and Poetry

Abstract

Eva Bezwoda was a prominent poet in the 1960s and 1970s, who contributed to several South African journals, as well as publishing One Hundred and Three Poems in 1973. Her death by suicide three years later seems congruen with the themes and preoccupations of her work, and was a loss to South Africa’s literary culture at the time. Despite critical attention to her work, after her death her legacy seems to have been forgotten, and her poetry neglected. In this article, I outline what is known of her biography, with a focus on her most productive years as a writer, and the development of her career in relation to recurrent motifs, prominent themes, and relevant details from her poems. I consider the critical reception of her work and engage with archival material, including correspondence from the year before her death with Ad Donker and personal responses to her death by Sheila Fugard and Lionel Abrahams.