Miriam Tlali

Miriam Tlali
Born 11 November 1933
Doornfontein, Johannesburg[1]
Nationality South African
Ethnicity Black
Genre Fiction

Miriam Tlali (born 11 November 1933)[2] is a South African novelist. She was the first black woman in South Africa to publish a novel,[1] Muriel at Metropolitan, in 1979. She was also one of the first to write about Soweto.

Life and work

Miriam Masoli Tlali[2] was born in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, and attended St Cyprian's Anglican School and then Madibane High School. She studied at the University of the Witwatersrand until it was closed to Blacks during the apartheid era; she later went to the National University of Lesotho at Roma, Lesotho. She left there because of lack of funds, and became an office clerk.[3]

Tlali's first book, Muriel at Metropolitan (1979; originally called Between Two Worlds), is a semi-autobiographical work and its "viewpoint is a new one in South African literature".[4] She later wrote other books, including Amandla (1980), Mihloti (1984), and Footprints in the Quag (1989).[5]

Further reading

References

  1. 1 2 "Miriam Tlali". WOMEN'S WORDS: AFRICAN WORLDS. August 21, 2010. Retrieved July 17, 2011.
  2. 1 2 Gugu Hlongwane, "Miriam Tlail", in Brian Schaffer (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, p. 1366-1368.
  3. Hans M. Zell, Carol Bundy & Virginia Coulon, A New Reader's Guide to African Literature, Heinemann Educational Books, 1983, p. 499.
  4. Mary Dyer, Reality, vol. 7, no. 6, January 1976, p. 15.
  5. "Tlali, Miriam"; The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th edition, 2007.
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