Lewis Nkosi

Lewis Nkosi (5 December 1936 – 5 September 2010) was a South African writer and essayist. Nkosi worked for many years in Durban for the magazine Ilanga lase Natal and in Johannesburg for Drum. Nkosi faced severe restrictions on his writing due to the publishing regulations found in the Suppression of Communism Act and the Publications and Entertainment Act passed in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1961, he received a scholarship to study at Harvard, and he began his life in exile. Since then, he has been an editor for The New African in London, and the NET in the United States. He became a Professor of Literature and has held positions at the University of Wyoming and the University of California-Irvine, as well as at universities in Zambia and Warsaw, Poland.

As opposed to apartheid, Nkosi's work explores themes of politics, relationships, and sexuality. His essays and other works were published over four decades in America, England and Africa.His works possesing great depth,received less recognition than they had actually deserved.In the post-aparteid era, his works are gaining critical attention across the third world. Interestingly, Nkosi joined forces with African powerhouse authors Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka in an interview in the third chapter of Bernth Lindfors' Conversations With Chinua Achebe. In 1978, Nkosi and composer Stanley Glasser wrote a collection of six Zulu-style songs called "Lalela Zulu" for The King's Singers, a group of six white British, male a capella singers.

Bibliography

Collections of essays

• Home and Exile, Longman, 1965
• Home and exile and other selections, Longman, 1983, ISBN 0-58-264406-2
• The Transplanted Heart: Essays on South Africa 1975
• Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature, Longman, 1981, ISBN 0-58-264145-4

Plays

• The Rhythm of Violence (1964)
• The Black Psychiatrist (2001)

Novels

• Mating Birds, Constable, 1986, ISBN 0-09-467240-7 (Winner of the Macmillan Pen prize)
• Underground People, Kwela, 2002, ISBN 0-79-570150-0, originally published in Dutch in 1994
• Mandela's Ego, Struik, 2006, ISBN 1-41-520007-6

Short Stories

• The Hold up

Films

• He shared the writing credits on Come Back, Africa, a film filmed mainly in Sophiatown.

References

• Conversations With Chinua Achebe Edited by Bernth Lindfors. University Press of Mississippi (October, 1997)
• Southern African Writing: Voyages and Explorations edited by Geoffrey V. Davis. Rodopi (January, 1994)
• Still Beating the Drum  : Critical perpespectives on Lewis Nkosi,Ed. by Lindy steibel and Liz Gunner(KwaZuluNatal university Press 2006)