| Sipho Sepamla |
| Posthumous Literary Award |
| Poet, novelist and educator Sydney Sepamla was born in a township near Krugersdorp, and lived most of his life in Soweto.
He studied teaching at Pretoria Normal College and published his first volume of poetry, Hurry Up to It!, in 1975. During this period he was active in the Black Consciousness movement and his 1977 book The Soweto I Love, partly a response to the Soweto Riots, was banned by the Apartheid regime. He was one of the founding members of the Federated Union of Black Artists (Fuba Academy of Arts) and editor of the literary magazine New Classic, and the theatre magazine S’ketsh. He published several volumes of poetry and novels, receiving the Thomas Pringle Award 1977 and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his writing. More recently in democratic South Africa he was a member of the governments’ Arts and Culture Task Group. |