Miriam Tlali is a short story writer who shapes the genre to record voices from the Soweto community. In so doing her fictional forms emerge from the politics of apartheid, from the dialogue, debate, argument and rhetoric of the struggle. Her forms not only serve as a protest against the ways individual lives are deformed by the realities of the oppressive laws and restrictions but they emerge from that conflict and become vehicles expressing the injustices black South Africans faced daily. In describing the setting of her first novel, Muriel at Metropolitan (1975) Miriam Tlali claims the store is ‘like a kind of stage where the whole of the South African scenario was being played out’ (Jolly 1998: 144). In a sense, this allusion to the dramatic captures the essence of Tlali's writing where the use of dialogue and the recording of voices constitutes so much of the content of her novels, stories, interviews and journalism. The evolution of Tlali's forms reflects her decision to foreground voices in her texts from the first person Muriel at Metropolitan (republished in 2004 as Between Two Worlds, Tlali's original and preferred title) to Amandla! which draws heavily on various discourses — dialogue, debate, speeches and pamphlets — to Mihloti and Soweto Stories which are interviews, first person journalistic accounts and stories Tlali bases on conversations with people who came to her with their experiences of township life.