For the South African triathlete, see Megan Hall.
Megan Hall is a South African writer. She was born in 1972 and lives in Cape Town, and graduated from the University of Cape Town with a BA Honours degree, following an undergraduate degree in English and Latin. [1] Her first volume of poems, Fourth Child, (Modjaji Books, 2007) won the Ingrid Jonker Prize for 2008. [2] For many years, she was Publishing Manager for Dictionaries and Literature at Oxford University Press, but left in 2018 and is now freelancing. [3]
Breyten Breytenbach is a South African writer, poet, and painter who became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party-led South African Government. Breytenbach is now informally considered by Afrikaans-speakers as their poet laureate and is one of the most important living poets in Afrikaans literature. He also holds French citizenship.
Ingrid Jonker (OIS), was a South African poet who wrote and one of the founders of modern Afrikaans literature. Her poems have been widely translated into other languages.
André Philippus Brink was a South African novelist, essayist and poet. He wrote in both Afrikaans and English and taught English at the University of Cape Town.
The poetry of South Africa covers a broad range of themes, forms and styles. This article discusses the context that contemporary poets have come from and identifies the major poets of South Africa, their works and influence.
Marlene van Niekerk is a South African poet, writer, and academic. She is best known for her novels, the satirical tragicomedy Triomf (1994) and the Herzog-winning Agaat (2004), which explore themes including the family, the change in power dynamics occasioned by the end of Apartheid, and inequalities of race, gender, and class. Van Niekerk is also an award-winning poet. She writes in her native tongue, Afrikaans, and teaches at Stellenbosch University.
Afrikaans literature is literature written in Afrikaans. Afrikaans is the daughter language of 17th-century Dutch and is spoken by the majority of people in the Western Cape of South Africa and among Afrikaners and Coloured South Africans in other parts of South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini. Afrikaans was historically one of the two official languages of South Africa, the other being English, but it currently shares the status of an "official language" with ten other languages.
John Eppel was born in Lydenburg, South Africa. He moved to Colleen Bawn, a small mining town in the south of Southern Rhodesia, at the age of four. He was educated at Milton High School in Bulawayo, and later attended the University of Natal in South Africa, where he completed his English master's degree in 'A Study of Keatsian Dialectics'. He married at the age of 34 and has three children; Ben, Ruth and Joe. His ex-wife, Shari, is a poet and prominent human rights activist. Eppel teaches English at Christian Brothers College, Bulawayo.
Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet and academic. She is the 2005 recipient of the Daimler Chrysler Award for South African Poetry. She lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa, and Pennsylvania, US, and serves as an assistant professor of Women's Studies and African and African American Studies at Penn State.
Wynberg Girls' High School is a public English medium high school for girls situated in Wynberg in Cape Town in the Western Cape province of South Africa.
Peter Emil Julius Blum was an Afrikaans poet. As a child, he emigrated to the Union of South Africa with his family. From an early age Blum was already able to speak several languages, including German and Italian.
Rustum Kozain is a South African poet and writer.
The Ingrid Jonker Prize is a literary prize for the best debut work of Afrikaans or English poetry. It was instituted in honor of Ingrid Jonker after her death in 1965.
Modjaji Books is a South African small-scale independent publisher. Started in 2007 by Colleen Higgs, it is an independent press that publishes the writings of Southern African women. Many Modjaji titles have gone on to be nominated for and to win prestigious literary awards both in South Africa and internationally.
Black Butterflies is an English-language Dutch drama film about the life of South-African Afrikaans poet and anti-apartheid political dissident Ingrid Jonker. The film was directed by Paula van der Oest and premiered in the Netherlands on February 6 before being released on 31 March 2011.
Finuala Dowling is a South African poet and writer.
Nick Mulgrew is a South African-British novelist, poet, and editor. In addition to his writing, he is the founder and director of the poetry press uHlanga.
Karin Schimke is a South African writer. She has won awards for her poetry and literary translations. She works as a writer and editor.
Maneo Refiloe Mohale is a queer South African Black feminist writer, editor, and poet. They have written for various local and international publications including Jalada, Prufrock, The Beautiful Project, The Mail & Guardian and spectrum.za. Their debut collection of poetry Everything is a deathly flower was published in September 2019 with uHlanga press. In 2020, Mohale was shortlisted for the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize, making them the youngest finalist of that year.
Sydney Clouts (1926–1982) was a South African poet. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and emigrated to London in the early 1960s. His book One Life gained its own volume in the New Coin Poetry Magazine in 1966. This debut poetry collection One Life won him the Ingrid Jonker Prize in 1966, for the best debut of Afrikaans or English poetry. It also won him the Olive Schreiner Prize for new and emergent talent of English Literature.
Mike Nicol is a South African writer and journalist. He was born in 1951 in Cape Town.