E-mail us a comment on this writer. (Comments may be edited and used on this website.) About the author One of the outstanding journalists who wrote for Drum in its heyday in the 1950s, Lewis Nkosi left South Africa on a one-way exit permit in 1960 to take up a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. While living in London subsequently, he contributed to leading UK literary journals, including the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books. He has taught literature at universities in Africa, Europe and the United States. Nkosi has written two novels – Mating Birds (1986) and Underground People (2002) – in addition to Mandela’s Ego. In 2005 a collection of essays on his life and writing, Still Beating the Drum: Critical Perspectives on Lewis Nkosi, was published by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Some of Lewis Nkosi’s other works: • A study of African literature, Tasks and Masks (1981) • Two collections of essays, Home and Exile (1965) and The Transplanted Heart (1975) • A number of short stories as well as plays for radio and theatre, including The Black Psychiatrist (1983), translated into French as Le Psychiatre noir by Astrid Starck-Adler From Lewis Nkosi (on the birth of Mandela’s Ego) “It is 1995. I am Visiting Professor at Brandeis University, where I teach two courses, one on South African literature and politics, the other a writing course … One day, I told my students I had a plan to introduce a bit of democracy into our writing workshop: to encourage them I would also begin to write a novel which, in the spirit of exchange, I would read back to them, chapter by chapter, as it developed. ‘What would the novel be about?’ the students wanted to know. I thought very quickly. An idea came to me ...” Title published by Umuzi Mandela’s Ego … And ah, how I miss that Angriest Angry Young Man, Lewis Nkosi. – Casey ‘Kid’ Motsisi, in Drum magazine, March 1963. home   writers   books   contact   buy   rights all content © Umuzi, Random House Struik this website designed and maintained by Guanaco.co.za