Cosmo Pieterse | |
---|---|
Born | Cosmo George Leipoldt Pieterse 1930 (age 92–93) |
Nationality | South African |
Alma mater | University of Cape Town |
Occupation(s) | Playwright, actor, poet, literary critic, broadcaster and anthologist |
Cosmo George Leipoldt Pieterse (born 1930 in Windhoek, Namibia) is a South African playwright, actor, [1] poet, literary critic and anthologist. [2]
Cosmo Pieterse went to the University of Cape Town and taught in Cape Town until leaving South Africa in 1965. He was banned under the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1962. [3] He subsequently taught in London and at Ohio University in the United States: [4] arriving at Ohio University in 1970, he became a tenured faculty member in 1976. However, after travelling to meet his London publisher in 1979 he was denied re-entry to the US on classified information, allegedly for being "a suspected communist". [5] [6]
In London, in the later 1960s and early '70s, Pieterse worked for the BBC World Service at Bush House and for the Transcription Centre, an organisation that under the direction of Dennis Duerden recorded and broadcast the works of African writers in Europe and Africa. [7] [8] Also an occasional actor, Pieterse appeared in The Burning, a 1968 30-minute short drama film directed by Stephen Frears. [9] [10] As a poet, Pieterse has been characterised as producing work that is very "European in its tone, metaphors, and delivery", as Laura Linda Holland writes: "Cosmo Pieterse's poems, like those of [Dennis] Brutus, are heavily inundated with Western influences, concerns, and motifs while retaining a definite African bias....Cosmo Pieterse uses his love of words to create poetry of hope and renewal." [11]
Pieterse edited several anthologies of plays and poetry for the African Writers Series published by Heinemann.
Angus Lindsay Ritchie Calder was a Scottish writer, historian, and poet. Initially studying English literature, he became increasingly interested in political history and wrote a landmark study on Britain during the Second World War in 1969 entitled The People's War. He subsequently wrote several other historical works but became increasingly interested in literature and poetry and worked primarily as a writer, though often holding a number of university teaching positions. A socialist, he was a prominent Scottish public intellectual during the 1970s and 1980s.
Gabriel Imomotimi Okara was a Nigerian poet and novelist who was born in Bumoundi in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, Nigeria. The first modernist poet of Anglophone Africa, he is best known for his early experimental novel, The Voice (1964), and his award-winning poetry, published in The Fisherman's Invocation (1978) and The Dreamer, His Vision (2005). In both his poems and his prose, Okara drew on African thought, religion, folklore and imagery, and he has been called "the Nigerian Negritudist". According to Brenda Marie Osbey, editor of his Collected Poems, "It is with publication of Gabriel Okara's first poem that Nigerian literature in English and modern African poetry in this language can be said truly to have begun."
James Harold Kirkup, FRSL was an English poet, translator and travel writer. He wrote over 45 books, including autobiographies, novels and plays. He wrote under many pen-names including James Falconer, Aditya Jha, Jun Honda, Andrew James, Taeko Kawai, Felix Liston, Edward Raeburn, and Ivy B. Summerforest. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Dennis Vincent Brutus was a South African activist, educator, journalist and poet best known for his campaign to have South Africa banned from the Olympic Games due to its racial policy of apartheid.
Dennis Beynon Lee is a Canadian poet, teacher, editor, and critic born in Toronto, Ontario. He is also a children's writer, well known for his book of children's rhymes, Alligator Pie.
Ayi Kwei Armah is a Ghanaian writer best known for his novels including The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Two Thousand Seasons (1973) and The Healers (1978). He is also an essayist, as well as having written poetry, short stories, and books for children.
The African Writers Series (AWS) is a collection of books written by African novelists, poets and politicians. Published by Heinemann, 359 books appeared in the series between 1962 and 2003.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
David John Murray Wright was an author and "an acclaimed South African-born poet".
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Chief Horst Ulrich Beier, commonly known as Ulli Beier, was a German editor, writer and scholar who had a pioneering role in developing literature, drama and poetry in Nigeria, as well as literature, drama and poetry in Papua New Guinea.
Carlton Lindsay Barrett, also known as Eseoghene, is a Jamaican-born poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist and photographer, whose work has interacted with the Caribbean Artists Movement in the UK, the Black Arts Movement in the US, and pan-Africanism in general. Leaving Jamaica in the early 1960s, he moved to Britain, where he freelanced as a broadcaster and journalist, also travelling and living elsewhere in Europe, before deciding to relocate to West Africa. Since the latter 1960s he has been based mainly in Nigeria, of which country he became a citizen in the mid-1980s, while continuing his connection to cultural ventures in the UK and US.
Clive Wake is a critic, editor and translator of modern African and French literature.
Yulisa Amadu Pat Maddy was a Sierra Leonean writer, poet, actor, dancer, director and playwright. Known by his friends and colleagues as Pat Maddy or simply Prof, he had an "immense impact" on theatre in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Zambia.
John O. Reed was an anthologist and translator of African literature.
Solomon Alexander Amu Djoleto is a Ghanaian writer and educator.
Bakare Gbadamosi is a Yoruba poet, anthropologist and short story writer from Nigeria.
George Hallett was a South African photographer known for images of South African exiles. His body of work captures much of the country's turbulent history through Apartheid and into the young democracy.
Amelia Blossom Pegram, also known as Amelia Blossom House, was a South African writer and performer, who began her working life as a teacher and was also an actor and model.