Sheila Meiring Fugard
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Sheila Meiring Fugard was born Sheila Meiring in Birmingham, England in 1932. In 1940, when she was just eight years old, she moved to South Africa with her parents. She went to the University of Cape Town while writing short stories and studying theatre. Meiring met playwright Athol Fugard while starring in one of his plays. In 1957 she married Fugard and started pursuing her own career as a writer.
Sheila Fugard didn’t publish her first novel until 1972, when she was 40 years old. This novel, The Castaways, ISBN 0-333-14222-5, won the Olive Schreiner Prize. Fugard has come out with several other novels including Rite of Passage, ISBN 0-86068-620-5, in 1976, and A Revolutionary Woman, ISBN 0-86068-620-5, in 1983. A Revolutionary Woman, her most famous book, takes place in the 1920’s in the Karoo district of South Africa and tells the story of a female disciple of Gandhi who gets entangled in a rape case between a young colored boy and a young retarded Boer girl. Rite of Passage is about a doctor and a young boy traumatized by a tribal circumcision ceremony. She has also come out with a couple of books of poems including Threshold ISBN 0-949937-11-8, in 1975, and Mystic Things ISBN 0-949937-87-8 in 1981.
Athol Fugard acted in the BBC adaptation of her novel The Castaways. Their daughter, Lisa Fugard, has acted in a few of Athol’s plays such as My Children! My Africa!, and has written a novel.
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[edit] External links
- Lady of Realisation Account of the life of Buddhist Sister Palmo, by Sheila Fugard
