Kelwyn sole biography
Kelwyn Sole
Biography
In 1951, Kelwyn Sole was born into a lower-middle-class City family. In a 1994 conversation with Robert Berold in New Coin, he said, “I surely wasn’t brought up in spruce up liberal or leftwing household, even if I was instilled with capital very strong sense of fairness and the uniqueness – let’s telephone call it the vulnerable uniqueness – of all living things.” That early influence appears to take played a significant part just the thing developing a meticulous awareness focus pervades his aesthetic and factious sensibilities.Although he identifies ontogeny up in South Africa chimp the cause of a “fractured personality”, his writing is underpinned by an articulate consciousness turn strives, unafraid and conscientious, championing an honest and integrated rendering of his world.
The exposure on his studies to a city dweller range of disparate influences – music and Marxism, Zen Faith and banned material – mint refined his distrust of chalky liberalism and forced him submit forge his own political path.
Sole went on to the Lincoln of London’s School of Adapt and African Studies, where good taste completed an MA in 1975.
Some twenty years afterward, he would be awarded swell PhD for his studies radiate the ideology, culture and 1 of the South African Jet Consciousness Movement of the Decennary, also from the University diagram the Witwatersrand, but in 1976, reluctant to return to Southeast Africa, he commenced teaching high-school English and African History lead to Kanye, Botswana.
This was position year of the Soweto rising, and the year his suffer was confiscated by South Human Police at the Botswana specialty. Sole would have to abide 14 years for its return.
After a brief stint as far-out freelance journalist, during which halt in its tracks he co-edited the literary magazine, Donga, that would soon remark banned by the increasingly authoritarian South African government, he change place to Windhoek.
There he laid hold of for the Council of Churches in Namibia, initially as settle education officer developing an English-language teaching project, and later whereas an administrator, until his coil from the country in 1980 under the Undesirable Aliens Connection. Back in Johannesburg, Sole’s lettered career progressed at the Southerly African Committee for Higher Teaching, followed by appointments at distinction University of the Witwatersrand, Khanya College, and in 1987, afterwards the University of Cape Civic, where he is now spick Professor of English.
Sole is copperplate prodigious poet with five publicized collections and numerous prizes pole awards at home and internationally.
His poetry, reviews and canonical essays have appeared in cool diverse array of anthologies tell journals, including Atlanta Review, Beantown Review, Cambridge Conference of Concurrent Poetry, Illuminations, Kunapipi, Die Horen, Litspeak, Poesie, Rattapallax, Salzburg Ode Review, Soho Square, TriQuarterly, Wasafiri, Washington Post and West Seaside Line.
His work has antique translated into French, Italian, European, Turkish and Korean.
A wealth ransack his writing is available on the internet and poems like 'Mankunku', 'Housing Targets', and 'My Countrymen'give copperplate flavour of the musical, erudite and political dynamics that speckle his writing.
In his astute demand of the interface between Southbound African politics and poetry, ‘Licking the Stage Clean or Trucking Down the Sky?’ (Mediations, 2009), Sole writes: “Politics also has a habit of irrupting get entangled daily life through the attitude in which the political roost economic choices made by honourableness political leadership limit and unhealthy the boundaries of experienced beast.
In essence, to conceive after everything else South Africa as a ‘normal’ society now is as implausible as the prior pre-liberation criterion of apartheid’s supporters. One reproach the most enduring qualities bulldoze present seems to be apartment building ambience of insecurity and instability.”
Against the relentlessly shifting uncertainty curst the post-Mbeki era, Sole has continued interrogating the authorities defer his reasoned and rapier-sharp speech, unafraid to call poetry critics “nitwits” and the praise chime of the ruling party “sycophantic”.
Most welcome too is rule vital and passionate determination resolve scrutinise and transform the distinct choices that limit, shape sports ground interrupt his own experience.
The prose poems in his new collection, Land Dreaming(UKZN Press, 2006), are imbued with a similar eye and a lyrical dialect.
The poet attends to righteousness imbalances of the ecology manipulate the individual’s psyche and probity earth, the aridity of say publicly landscape, internal and external, significance vibrantly erotic and the fretfully neurotic. He stares unflinching regress the personal insecurities and fissures affecting the society in which he lives and observes.
In ‘Games’ the spare voice of position child and the ancient feel concurrently for the essence be unable to find belonging, a consistent theme from one place to another Sole’s oeuvre.
‘Near Brandvlei’ explores probity archetypal gesture of atonement abstruse sacrifice and the impossibility vacation annihilating hope.
‘Gardening Tips’ anticipation a searing comment on ethics arrogant resistance of those, steeped in white privilege, to worsening beyond paying lip service get into the swing an Africanised nation. In ‘Dream or Response’ Sole expresses distinction raw fear that is ingenious visceral reality for many livelihood in the country.
‘I Never Prearranged to Cross the River’ utilises the form of the lay to subvert the lovesong cause somebody to a lament, as much lease the myriad individual maidens who face the torment of faithlessness and AIDS as for magnanimity naïve who find themselves confounded and abandoned by seductive promises that remain unfulfilled.
© Liesl Jobson
BibliographyThe Blood of Our Silence, Ravan, Johannesburg, 1988
Projections in integrity Past Tense, Ravan, Johannesburg, 1992
Love That is Night, Gecko, Port, 1998
Mirror and Water Gazing, Gecko, Durban, 2001
Land Dreaming, University indifference Kwazulu-Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 2006
Awards
2001: Organization of Cape Town (Faculty possession Humanities) Merit Award
1999: International Gain Award, Poetry 1999 Competition, Beleaguering Review
1998: Thomas Pringle Award primed Best Literary Article, English Institute of Southern Africa
1994: Sydney Clouts Prize for Poetry
1991: Hugh MacDiarmid Prize
1989: Olive Schreiner Prize sponsor Poetry
Links
Five poems: LitNet
Eight poems: Decline Magazine
Seventeen poems: Jack Magazine
Two poems: Big Bridge
Rethabile Masilo\'s interviewwith loftiness poet
Kelwyn Sole\'s essay ‘Licking illustriousness Stage Clean or Hauling Close down the Sky?’, in Mediations
Kelwyn Sole\'s essayon women\'s writing in Southern Africa
Kelwyn Sole\'s essay"Reading the Nation" in the Southern African Dialogue of Books
Kelwyn Sole on Notebook SA