Ruth Miller (poet)

Ruth Miller was a South African poet. Born in 1919 in Uitenhage she grew up in the northern Transvaal and spent her adult life in Johannesburg. She worked as a school secretary and later English teacher. She died of cancer in 1969.

She wrote short stories and plays, but is best known for her poems, which were frequently anthologised. She won the Ingrid Jonker Prize for her first volume of poems, Floating Islands (1965). A second collection Selected Poems appeared in 1968 in the Phoenix Living Poets series. After her death a selection of her published and unpublished work Poems, Prose, Plays appeared, edited by Lionel Abrahams.

References

• Mettelerkamp, Joan (1994). "Ruth Miller (1919-1969)", Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, eds Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly. London: Routledge, pp 1025–1026.
• Adey, David et al., eds (). "Ruth Miller", Companion to South African English Literature. Johannesburg: Ad Donker, p137.
• Pordzik, Ralph (1998). "'The Shade is Bad for Singers’. Szenarios kultureller und individueller Grenzüberschreitung in der Lyrik der Südafrikanerin Ruth Miller", Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 46.2, pp. 157–72.