Rive, Richard Moore (1931–1989)
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…
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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…
Voorslag
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…
Sestigers, The
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.…
Van Wyk, Christopher (1957–2014)
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…
Schoeman, Karel (1939–)
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…
Battiss, Walter (1906–1982)
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…
Nadine Gordimer (1923–)
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…
Clouts, Sydney (1926–1982)
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]),…
Laubser, Maggie (1886–1972)
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…
Jacobson, Dan (1929–2014)
Dan Jacobson was a South African novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and translator who spent most of his adult life and the more productive…
Cecil Edwin Frans Skotnes (1926–2009)
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…
Butler, Frederick Guy (1918–2001)
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…
Fugard, Athol (1932--)
Athol Fugard has been a novelist and memoirist (of sorts), but is best known for his pioneering political work in the theatre as a writer,…
Kumalo, Sydney (1935–1988)
Sydney Kumalo (1935–1988) was an important early black modernist working primarily in cast metal sculpture and drawing. As an artist and educator, Kumalo’s contributions were…
Millin, Sarah Gertrude (1888–1968)
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…
Glasser, Sylvia (1940–)
Over the course of a career that stretches across from the regime of apartheid through the transition and into the establishment of a democratic republic,…
The Bloody Horse
The Bloody Horse: Writing and the Arts was a Johannesburg-based magazine that published six issues between 1980 and 1981. The idea for the periodical developed…
Hope, Christopher (David) Tully (1944–)
Born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1944, the late modernist author Christopher Tully Hope is still alive, and still publishing, though has spent much of…
Rabie, Jan (1920–2001)
Jan Rabie was a key figure in the movement in Afrikaans literature known as the Sestigers, comprising writers who published in the 1960s. Living in…
Modernism in Africa
Though they often escape critical scrutiny, concepts such as modernism, modernity, and modernization are at the heart of the concept of development, and thus omnipresent…
Bosman, Herman Charles (1905–1951)
A short-story writer, novelist, poet and journalist, Bosman was born in Kuils River near Cape Town, but spent most of his life in the Transvaal,…
Plaatje, Solomon Tshekisho (1876–1932)
Born in 1876 in the rural Free State, Sol Plaatje is descended from the Barolong boo-Modiboa, royals who had been deposed in the 1500s. The…
Head, Bessie Amelia (1937–1986)
Novelist, short-story and non-fiction writer Bessie Head was born in a Pietermaritzburg psychiatric institution, her white mother Bessie Amelia Emery (née Birch), who had had…
The Boer War (1899–1902)
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…