The Star Child
**Longlisted for the Sunday Times 2017, Fiction Prize**
Nwelezelanga is born an albino. Convinced by the midwife that an albino child is a curse, her mother places her in a river to drown.
However, fate has other plans and the baby is rescued and raised by a traditional healer. She grows into an old soul with mystic abilities and her story unfolds as she lives a rural life, connected to the earth and ancient rituals.
The Star Child is magical and poetic with an assured voice and eloquent prose, Magubeni invites us into the life of this extraordinary being, Nwelezelanga, the child who should not have been.
Unathi Magubeni’s debut novel, Nwelezelanga, The Star Child (BlackBird Books) was published in South Africa in 2016 and was long-listed for the 2016 Etisalat Prize for Literature and the 2017 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Unathi was selected as the 2019 Eastern Cape National Book Week Ambassador. His work encourages reading and writing in different schools in the rural heartland of the Eastern Cape of South Africa.
