Dennis Vincent Brutus

Craig McLuckie (Okanagan College)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 7.2.3.03: South Africa and other Southern Writing and Culture.
Vol. editors: Helen Rachel Cousins (Birmingham Newman University), David Firth (University of Manchester)

Dates

Born 28 Nov 1924
Died 26 Dec 2009
Activity 1944-2009

Places

Born in Zimbabwe
Active in South Africa

Activities

Primary

Poet
Teacher/ Professor

Resources

Brutus' Works

Save to Bookshelf

Dennis Brutus, poet and anti-apartheid sports activist, has been a champion of human rights his entire life. His poetry is political, but ranges from the lyrical intensity of

A Simple Lust

and the narrative complexity of

Letters to Martha

to the, at times, slack, occasional and sloganeering. This degeneration has less to do with a loss of his poetic skills than with an increasingly political and impatient “literary” environment among the oppressed in South Africa.

Dennis Brutus was born on November 28th 1924, in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe) to South African parents. Francis Henry Brutus and Margaret Winifred Bloemetjie were teachers, who moved to the coastal town of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, where Brutus grew up in the district of Dowerville with siblings

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1692 words

Citation: McLuckie, Craig. "Dennis Vincent Brutus". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 May 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=621, accessed 25 November 2024.]