Lewis Nkosi |
Lifetime Achievement Literary Award |
Lewis Nkosi was born in 1936 in Durban and was educated in local schools and later at the University of London and the University of Sussex . After taking an M.A. degree at Sussex Lewis Nkosi did a research on Joseph Conrad, he returned to Africa to teach at the University of Zambia for eight years.A former journalist at Drum magazine in its heyday of the 1950s Nkosi was forced to live in exile by the previous apartheid regime after winning a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University . He has contributed to some of the leading literary journals, including The Times Literary Supplement. He has taught literature in a number of universities in including the University of Warsaw (Poland), the University of London, Brandeis University (Boston), the University of California and the University of Wyoming (U.S.A.).
A renowned literary critic, novelist and dramatist Nkosi has written several novels, the prize-winning Mating Birds (translated in French as Le sable des blancs), Underground People and Mandela’s Ego. He is the author of three seminal books of critical analysis on African literature, Tasks And Masks, Home And Exile and The Transplanted Heart. His play The Black Psychiatrist (translated into French by Astrid Starck-Adler) toured Martinique in October 2006. In 2005 Rodopi published a collection of essays Critical Perspectives On Lewis Nkosi edited by Lindy Stiebel and Liz Gunner. Wits University Press published the local edition of the book in June 2006. Lewis Nkosi was honoured with the South African Lifetime Achievement Literary Award in 2006. |