We provide existence results and comparison principles for solutions of backward stochastic difference equations (BS∆Es) and then prove convergence of these to solutions of backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) when the mesh size of the time-discretizaton goes to zero. The BS∆Es and BSDEs are governed by drivers f N (t, ω, y, z) and f (t, ω, y, z), respectively. The new feature of this paper is that they may be non-Lipschitz in z. For the convergence results it is assumed that the BS∆Es are based on d-dimensional random walks W N approximating the d-dimensional Brownian motion W underlying the BSDE and that f N converges to f . Conditions are given under which for any bounded terminal condition ξ for the BSDE, there exist bounded terminal conditions ξ N for the sequence of BS∆Es converging to ξ, such that the corresponding solutions converge to the solution of the limiting BSDE. An important special case is when f N and f are convex in z. We show that in this situation, the solutions of the BS∆Es converge to the solution of the BSDE for every uniformly bounded sequence ξ N converging to ξ. As a consequence, one obtains that the BSDE is robust in the sense that if (W N , ξ N ) is close to (W, ξ) in distribution, then the solution of the N th BS∆E is close to the solution of the BSDE in distribution too.