Athol Fugard (born 11 June 1932) is a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director who writes in English, best known for his political plays opposing the South African system of apartheid and for the 2005 Academy-Award winning film of his novel Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood. He is an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting, and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. For academic year 2000–2001, he was the IU Class of 1963 Wells Scholar Professor at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana. The recipient of many awards, honors, and honorary degrees, including the 2005 Order of Ikhamanga in Silver “for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre” from the government of South Africa, he is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Athol Fugard was born as Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard, in Middelburg, Eastern Cape, South Africa, on 11 June 1932, to English and Afrikaner parents; his mother, Elizabeth Magdalena (née Potgieter), an Afrikaner, operated first a general store and then a lodging house; his father, Harold, was a disabled former jazz pianist of Irish, English and French Huguenot descent.In 1935, his family moved to Port Elizabeth. In 1938, he began attending primary school at Marist Brothers College, a private Catholic school founded by the Marist Brothers; after being awarded a scholarship, he enrolled at a local technical college for secondary education and then matriculated at the University of Cape Town, but he dropped out of the university in 1953, a few months before final examinations. He left home, hitchhiked to North Africa with a friend, and then spent the next two years working in the Far East on a steamer ship, the SS Graigaur,” where he began writing, an experience “celebrated” in his 1999 autobiographical play The Captain’s Tiger: A Memoir for the Stage.
In September 1956, he married Sheila Meiring, a University of Cape Town Drama School student whom he had met the previous year. Now known as Sheila Fugard, she is a novelist and poet, and the Fugards’ daughter, Lisa Fugard, is also a novelist.
The Fugards moved to Johannesburg in 1958, where he worked as a clerk in a “Native Commissioners’ Court,” which “made him keenly aware of the injustices of apartheid.” The political impetus of Fugard’s plays brought him into conflict with the national government; in order to avoid prosecution, he would have his plays produced and published outside of South Africa.
He and his wife live in San Diego, California, where he teaches as an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting, and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and maintain a residence in South Africa.
On February 12th 2010 a theatre named in honour of Athol Fugard, The Fugard Theatre, will open in The District Six area of Cape Town, South Africa. The theatre will open with performances by the Isango Portobello theatre company and a new play written and directed by Athol Fugard, entitled The Train Driver, will play at the theatre in March 2010.
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