Don Maclennan was born in London, educated at the Universities of Witwatersrand and Edinburgh, and taught literature at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, for 30 years until 1994. He first made a name writing plays, notably the modernist The Voyage of the Santiago (1977), alongside some literary critical work. He came to poetry relatively late, with Life Songs (1977) and his first substantial collection, Reckonings (1983). He eventually published some 20 volumes, including the Selected Poems (2006) and the posthumous Dress Rehearsal (2010). Solstice (1997) won the Sanlam Literary Prize.