Arthur Nortje

Arthur Kenneth Nortje was born on December 16, 1942, in Oudtshoorn, Western Cape. Educated under Dennis Brutus at Paterson High School in Port Elizabeth, he graduated from the University of the Western Cape before winning a scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford, in 1965.

Exiled from South Africa due to apartheid's racial restrictions, Nortje taught in Canada and Britain while writing poetry of searing emotional power and linguistic brilliance. His poems captured the torment of homelessness, racial alienation, and poetic vocation. He died in Oxford at the age of twenty-seven; his collected poems, published posthumously as Dead Roots in Heinemann's African Writers Series, established his enduring stature in world poetry.