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Xaba won the Deon Hofmeyr Award for Creative Writing (2005) for her unpublished short story "Running". Her poems have appeared in publications including Timbila, Sister Namibia, Botsotso, South African Writing, Green Dragon and Echoes, and have been collected in These Hands (2005) 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 2026 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.

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

Works

 * These Hands: Poems. Timbila Poetry Project, Elim Hospital, Limpopo Province, 2005. Poetry. ISBN 978-0958464086.
 * Tongues of Their Mothers. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008. Poetry. ISBN 978-1869141448.
 * Running and Other Stories. Cape Town: Modjaji Books, 2013. Fiction. ISBN 978-1920590161.
 * Like the Untouchable Wind: An Anthology of Poems (editor). Harare: MaThoko's Books, 2016. Poetry anthology. ISBN 9781928215479.
 * The Alkalinity of Bottled Water. Botsotso Publishing, 2019. Poetry. ISBN 9780994708168