Cope, (Robert Knox) Jack (1913–1991)
‘Jack’ Cope was a South African novelist, poet, editor, and short story writer. Born June 3, 1913 in Mooi River, Natal, South Africa, he spent…
‘Jack’ Cope was a South African novelist, poet, editor, and short story writer. Born June 3, 1913 in Mooi River, Natal, South Africa, he spent…
Voorslag (Whiplash) was a literary journal published in South Africa from 1926 to 1927. Sold as ‘A Magazine of South African Life and Art’, it…
Douglas Livingstone is regularly cited as South Africa’s pre-eminent poet of the twentieth century. Born in Malaysia, but settling in South Africa at the age…
Nadine Gordimer is a preeminent South African writer and activist. Born in Springs, Transvaal, South Africa, to Jewish immigrants, Gordimer was briefly educated at a…
Alan Paton, born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, in 1903, is one of South Africa’s most widely read writers. His famous novel, Cry, the Beloved Country…
Cecil Skotnes (b. 1926, East London, Eastern Cape, South Africa; d. 2009, Cape Town, South Africa) was a print-maker, woodcarver, and educator who played a…
André Philippus Brink is one of South Africa’s most esteemed writers. Initially writing only in Afrikaans, he was one of the leading figures of the…
Pauline Smith was born in Oudtshoorn, in the Little Karoo, South Africa. Her beloved father, who was the first resident physician of the area, died…
Born 1 March 1931 in Cape Town, South African author Richard Rive was a novelist, editor, short story writer, and critic. Rive grew up in…
Schooled in South Africa, in 1919 Campbell went to Oxford, but never entered the university. After marriage to Mary Garman in 1922, and the success…
The British Empire waged two wars in southern Africa at the close of the nineteenth century. In the First Boer War (or Transvaal War) of…
Born in 1938 in Maseru, Lesotho (then Basutoland), South Africa, Ephraim Ngatane was a painter and jazz musician affiliated with the first generation of modern…
Born in 1934 in Bedford, Eastern Cape, South Africa, William (Bill) Stewart Ainslie was a painter and educator, and the founder of a number of…
Dennis Brutus was an author born in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). He was raised in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He was classified as a…
During the 1960s a group of Afrikaans writers who called themselves ‘Die Sestigers’ (Those of the sixties) became prominent on the South African literary scene.…
Born in Baragwanath, Soweto, Chris van Wyk proved an influential figure on the South African literary scene. Associated with the Black Consciousness movement, his volume…
Although Karel Schoeman is not as well-known as his South African contemporaries André Brink, Nadine Gordimer, J. M., Coetzee and Breyten Breytenbach, he is one…
Walter Battiss was a leading South African painter, printmaker, author, educator and academic, well known for his non-representational oil paintings, impressionistic water colours and symbolic…
Lewis Nkosi is increasingly recognized as one of South Africa’s foremost literary critics, and also as an iconoclastic writer of novels and plays. His years…
Novelist, short-story writer and essayist Zoë Wicomb was born in Namaqualand, South Africa. Much of her fiction and criticism deals with the construction of racial…
Sydney Clouts was perhaps the most modernist South African poet of his generation. Though his published oeuvre, including a single published volume (One Life [1966]),…
Breyten Breytenbach is the foremost poet among the ”Sestigers,” a prolific painter, and also a controversial public figure. He was born in Bonnievale, South Africa,…
The painter Maggie Laubser occupies an important space in South African art history. Her evolution as an artist was greatly influenced by her initial European-style…
Guy Butler, poet, playwright, director, historian, autobiographer, essayist, academic and public intellectual, was born and raised in the Eastern Cape in South Africa. He began…
Born of Lithuanian Jewish parentage, author Sarah Gertrude Millin grew up amongst the diamond diggings in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. Beginning with…