Litnet

An award-winning poet and playwright, educator and editor, Kobus Moolman teaches creative writing in the Department of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. He is regarded as one of South Africa’s leading lyrical poets.
         
Kobus is the author of three solo collections of poetry, Time like Stone (2000), Feet of the Sky (2003), and Separating the Seas (2007), as well as a joint collection, 5 Poetry (2001), with four other South African poets. Time like Stone, his debut collection, was awarded the prestigious Ingrid Jonker Prize for 2001.

His play Full Circle was awarded the Jury Prize at the 2004 Performing Arts Network of South Africa Festival of New Writing. The play premiered at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown to critical acclaim. It was later produced at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, the Oval House Theatre in London, and recently at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. The play was published in 2007 by Dye Hard Press.

In 2003 Kobus was a finalist in the BBC African Performance radio drama competition. His winning play, Soldier Boy, was produced for the BBC World Service. In the same year it was read at the Moscow Theatre Festival of New Writing. In 2007 it was published together with two of his other radio plays in a collection entitled Blind Voices.

He is the recipient of the Macmillan Southern African Playwriting Award (1991) and the BBC African Radio Theatre Award (1987).

He was the founding editor of the annual KwaZulu-Natal poetry journal Fidelities, which ran from 1995 until 2007. As co-ordinator of the Fidelities Poetry Project he conducted creative writing workshops and readings for a variety of interest groups, from high school youth to prison inmates.

In 2008 he produced an illustrated, limited-edition cycle of poems entitled Anatomy. This collection was later published in the Journal of Disability Studies (Ohio State University). It won the Dramatic and Literary Rights Organization Prize for the best poem to appear in New Coin magazine in 2008.

In 2009 his poem “Boy” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

In 2010 he was a special guest, for two months, of the Creative Writing Research Group of the University of Calgary in Canada. During this period he gave readings of his work and lectured. He was subsequently also invited to give a reading at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He was an invited guest at the 2010 Calgary International Spoken Word Festival, during which time he performed at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In the same year he edited and published Tilling the Hard Soil: poetry, prose and art by South African Writers with Disabilities (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press).

Kobus recently published his fifth collection of poetry, Light and After (deep south), which he read at the inaugural Midlands Meander Literary Festival.

Opgedateer/Updated: 2010-08-26
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