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Bessie Head (1937-1986Bessie Head is usually considered Botswana's most important writer. She was born in South Africa, the child of a wealthy white South African woman and a black servant when interracial relationships were illegal in South Africa. Her mother was apparently mentally ill; the exact circumstances are disputed but it should be noted that some comments by Bessie Head, which are often quoted as if straight autobiography, are in fact from fictionalized settings.

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As a baby, Bessie Head was fostered or adopted (sources differ) until she was 13 by a mixed race ("coloured") South African family and then sent to an orphanage, although she had contact with her mother's family, who paid for her education.

She became a teacher, then a journalist for Drum in the 1950s and '60s.

She moved to Botswana (then still the Bechuanaland Protectorate) in 1964 as a refugee, having been peripherally involved with Pan-African politics. It took 15 years before Bessie was given Botswana citizenship.

Bessie Head settled in Serowe, the largest of Botswana's "villages" (i.e. traditional settlements as opposed to settler towns). Serowe was famous both for its historical importance, as capital of the Bamangwato tribe, and for the experimental Swaneng school of Patrick van Rensburg. The deposed chief of the Bamangwato, Seretse Khama, was soon to become the first President of independent Botswana.

Almost all of Head's important work was written in Serowe, in particular, the three Serowe novels . Her work, which emphasised the value of ordinary life and humble people, was somewhat out of keeping with the general contemporary trend in African writing for overt political commitment, but it has lasted well. Religious ideas figure prominently, specially in ; Bessie Head had had an initially Christian upbringing but had later been much influenced by Hinduism (from South Africa's Indian community). Her ideas cannot, however, be easily summarized.

The novel , which was published posthumously, had been written before Head left South Africa.

Bessie Head remained in many ways an outsider in her adopted country, and had something of a lovehate relationship with it. She suffered from mental health problems, and at one point put up a public notice making bizarre and shocking allegations about the President, Sir Seretse Khama, leading to a period in Lobatse Mental Hospital. Fortunately Khama was a well-balanced man who did not take this personally. is partly based on these experiences.

Her books (novels, stories, autobiography, essays and letters) include the partly autobiographical

Her early death in 1986 (aged 49) from hepatitis came, tragically, just at the point where she was starting to achieve recognition and was no longer so desperately poor.