South Africa’s literary accomplishments are as diverse as its peoples, its regional voices as richly-textured as its many cultures. There are fully 11 official languages recognized in the country – from English and Afrikaans to Sesotho and Setswana -- and writers from nearly every one of these tongues has made a mark on the literary landscape.

South Africa boasts two Nobel winners in literature, Nadine Gordimer (1923- ) and J.M. Coetzee (1940- ).

Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer was the first of her compatriots to win the highest literary honor, in 1991. Gordimer, who has ventured from her native land only occasionally in her lifetime, is the author of 10 novels, most recently None to Accompany Me, ten short story collections, and much nonfiction. Gordimer noted in her acceptance speech for the Nobel, “It was the dream of my contemporaries, white and black, to venture there as the only way to enter the world of artists. It took the realization that the colour bar - I use that old, concrete image of racism - was like the gate of the law in Kafka's parable, which was closed to the supplicant throughout his life because he didn't understand that only he could open it. It took this to make us realize that what we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place.”

In 2003, J.M. Coetzee became South Africa’s second Nobel winner (and previous to that, the only author in the world to win the Booker Prize for Literature twice). A native of Cape Town, Coetzee has lived in Australia since 2002. Not overtly political, his novel Disgrace breaks with the overt political tenor of the writing of so many of his fellow countrymen, yet “a moral vision so frankly accepting of violence, seeing suffering as a greater virtue than justice, would seem odd in a novel set almost anywhere else.”

Moreover, Coetzee’s writing echoes with the psychological and moral freight of his main literary influences, Kafka and Dostoevsky. His vision of “the new social order” in post-Apartheid South Africa has been called “nightmarish, an out-of-time dystopia” by the Guardian (London). And, as Andrew O'Hehir noted, “J.M. Coetzee tells us something we all suspect and fear -- that political change can do almost nothing to eliminate human misery.”

For more information about J.M. Coetzee, visit the following links:

Book review of his seminal work.

Not surprisingly, the political tensions have struck the most dominant chord in South Africa’s books, poems and essays. Some notable South African political writers are listed below.

Poet and activist who was spent time doing hard labor for calling for an end to South Africa’s “athletic apartheid” in the Olympic games. ". . . all our land is scarred with terror / rendered unlovely and unlovable; / sundered are we and all our passionate surrender / but somehow tenderness survives." (from "Somehow We Survive"). He is now a leading voice in protesting the environmental impact of the IMF and World Bank’s lending policies.

As a novelist, playwright, travel writer, translator, literary critic, mentor, professor and polemicist, Brink is one of the most versatile figures in South African literary circles. His novels have been translated into some 26 languages, including Serbo-Croatian, Japanese and isiXhosa. He has received a number of awards for his writing, including being a three-time winner of the CNA Award and the 1992 recipient of the Mosimaniën Prize for Human Rights. He has also been been nominated twice, in 1976 and then 1978, for the Booker Award.

Athol Fugard was born in Middelburg, South Africa in 1932. His full name is Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard and as a child he was known as Hally before he decided he wanted to be called Athol. He is white with English and Afrikaner parents. He was brought up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa with English as his mother tongue. He describes himself as an Afrikaner writing in English. Fugard’s plays have been regularly premiered in fringe theatres in South Africa, London (The Royal Court Theatre) and New York.

Serote was raised in Alexandra, a black township on the north side of Johannesburg. After leaving school, he worked as a journalist and became an active participant in the struggle against apartheid. Serote was one of a group of black poets who began to write and publish in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was perhaps the most striking writer of this group: in many of his poems he succeeded in turning an acute sociopolitical awareness and an active commitment to the cause of justice and liberation into imaginative metaphors permeated by a wholly personal, passionate lyricism

Paton is a South African writer, founder and president of the Liberal Party (1953-68), which opposed apartheid and offered a non-racial alternative to government policy. His best known novel is Cry, The Beloved Country, which was finished in 1948. It depicted the collective guilt and friendship across racial prejudices in the story of a black South African. Stephen Kumalo, an ageing Zulu minister, travels from his tribal village to Johannesburg, where he finds that his only son, Absalom, has murdered the only son of a white man, James Jarvis.

With the end of Apartheid in 1994, a new generation of writers quickly emerged. While some are concerned with racial inequities, most look at the problems emerging today: AIDS, xenophobia, class polarization, urbanization, and the tension between traditional African values and the new society coming into being. Some influential black authors are listed below.

For more information literature and writers in South Africa, visit the following links:

A nearly complete list of South Africa’s most influential writers and authors.

A review of fiction, non-fiction, and mystery titles of contemporary South African authors.

South Africa has had a rich history of literary output. Until relatively recently, realism dominated the production of fiction in South Africa - perhaps authors felt an overriding concern to capture the country's turbulent history and the experiences of its people. Fiction has been written in all of South Africa's 11 official languages - with a large body of work in Afrikaans, in particular - but this overview focuses primarily on English fiction, though it also touches on major poetic developments.

Zakes Mda was was born in the Eastern Cape in 1948. He has studied and worked in South Africa, Lesotho, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He now devotes his time to writing and teaching. His previous novels, "She plays With the Darkness", "Ways of Dying" and "The Heart of Redness", represent a new direction in post-apartheid writing and have been acclaimed for their introduction of magic realism into South African fiction.

An interview with biographical information about the South African author.

An interview with biographical information about the South African author.