Mongane Wally Serote, National Poet Laureate of South Africa

South African poet and novelist Mongane Wally Serote, born in 1944, was politically active against the apartheid regime. He was detained without trial and held in solitary confinement under the Terrorism Act. After earning an MFA at Columbia University on a Fulbright scholarship, he was barred from reentering South Africa, and he lived in exile in Botswana and London before returning to South Africa in 1990. A member of the African National Congress, he was elected to Parliament in the pivotal election of Nelson Mandela’s government in 1994.

Serote’s talk will commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Soweto uprising in the context of his friendship with Steve Biko and other members of the Black Consciousness Movement, and will consider parallels to the Black Power Movement and Black Lives Matter Movement. He will also give a short reading from his work.

Serote’s work speaks directly to political resistance and engagement. His collections include Yakhal’inkomo (The Cry of Cattle at the Slaughterhouse, 1972), No Baby Must Weep (1975), Third World Express (1992), and History Is the Home Address (2004). His novels include To Every Birth Its Blood (1981) and Revelations (2011).

Serote’s honors include the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize, and the Chilean government’s Pablo Neruda Award.

See also: Interview with Mongane Wally Serote in The Believer

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of English, and is part of the Utah Humanities Books Festival. Additional support from Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts & Parks, and the Salt Lake City Arts Council.

Views expressed in Tanner Humanities Center events do not reflect the official views of the Center or the University of Utah.