Rose Zwi's parents left the predominantly Jewish town of Zhagar, Lithuania, in 1926, moving to Oaxaca, Mexico, where she was born. In 1930 they settled in South Africa where Zwi received her education. In 1949 she immigrated to Israel where she was married. She lived there for three years before returning to South Africa via London. A speaker of English, Afrikaans, Yiddish and Hebrew, she graduated from the University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) with a BA (Hons) in English Literature in 1967 and became active in civil rights organisations. While an editor at Ravan Press she published her first novel, Another Year in Africa, winning the Olive Schreiner Award for 1982. She published several other novels in South Africa before immigrating to Australia in 1988. Her first novel published in Australia was The Umbrella Tree (1990) which had won the Mofolo/Plomer Prize for an unpublished novel in 1982. She has since published several novels set in South Africa and a Last Walk in Naryshkin Park (1996), a memoir and historical account of the massacre of Jews in her parents' home town on 2 October 1941.