Yandiswa Xhakaza was born in the rural Eastern Cape, South Africa, raised between the village and the city, never fully claimed by either. She grew up between two women who shaped her in different ways, a grandmother who lived fully and beautifully by her own rules, and a mother who devoted her life to building the home she had longed for as a child. Moving between these two models of womanhood gave her a lasting sensitivity to belonging, inheritance, and the tensions that run through family and nation. From early on, she was asking whose story she was meant to live and whose voice she had inherited.

By day, she works as a Development Practitioner, evaluating the impact of social programmes across Africa and directing how capital is deployed to advance positive social outcomes. She is currently Managing Partner: Strategy and Partnerships at Darelude Consulting and Advisory, and has previously led institutions including The Nal'ibali Trust and the University of Cape Town's Online High School. Her professional work sits at the intersection of strategy, accountability, and long-term systems change.

She holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Pretoria, a Postgraduate Diploma in Public and Development Management from the University of the Witwatersrand, and a Bachelor of Education from the same institution. Alongside this formal training, she sustains a reflective writing practice through which she interrogates the deeper currents shaping African life.

At night, she wrestles with the dissonance of a world that feels out of step with what she knows to be true. She came to her book to make sense of the fractures she carries, colonisation, patriarchy, erased histories, and stolen ancestral memory. Through her writing, she seeks to reach others who have felt similar dislocation and unmooring, offering a path toward reclaiming their bodies, their spirituality, and the lineage that has always been theirs.