Want fewer ads?

Lewis Nkosi (5 December 1936 — 5 September 2010) was a South African writer and essayist.

He was a multifaceted personality, and attempted every literary genre, literary criticism, poetry, drama, and novels. 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. He was an editor for The New African in London, and the NET in the United States. He became a Professor of Literature and 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, possessing great depth, received less recognition than they had actually deserved. In the post-apartheid 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 cappella singers.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Lewis Nkosi", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0