Adam Small (writer)
Adam Small ( born December 21, 1936 in Wellington, South Africa) is a South African writer and humanities. He was the only Coloured in the avant-garde movement of the writing in Afrikaans Sestigers. In 2012 he was awarded the Hertzog Prize.
Life
When Small was a year old, he moved to Goree at Robertson, where his father John Small - formerly January Dampies - worked as a teacher and plays for the local Sunday school wrote. 1938 his sister was born. The end of 1944 the family moved to retreat in the Cape Flats, where his father was headmaster. About the work of his father, he was the subject of " poverty " in touch. His mother, Fatimah Suliman, was a Muslim, so that he came into contact with Islam. Both factors influenced his work.
He attended St. Columba Catholic School in Athlone on the Cape Flats, briefly studied medicine and then philosophy at the University of Cape Town and earned a master's degree there with a thesis on Nicolai Hartmann and Friedrich Nietzsche. He began his career in 1959 as a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Fort Hare. In 1960 he was appointed Head of the Philosophy Department at the newly founded University of the Western Cape (UWC ), which had been specially set up for coloreds. In the early 1960s he was the only non-white member of the Sestigers whose goal was to change the content and form of the Afrikaans literature. From 1963 to 1965 he studied at Oxford University. As a result of his political activism for the Black Consciousness Movement in 1973 he had to leave the UWC and was unemployed for a time before he found a new position as head of the Student Body Services at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. 1979 joined several of his fellow writers, including Etienne Leroux and Elsa Joubert, from the South African Academy for the Sciences and Arts, because she refused to take Small. 1984 appointed to Small professor and head of the Department of Social Work at the UWC. He was a senior professor at the UWC in 1993, In 1997 he became Professor Emeritus.
Small wrote poems, plays and a novel. He used the first poet the Cape Afrikaans, the language of the typical Cape Flats. During the 1970s, he wrote a long time in English. The focus of his work is on the role of 'colored' in apartheid. In his poems he frequently uses satire, irony and sarcasm. As his most famous drama applies Kanna hy kô hystoe ( German as: " Kanna: He comes home " ), in which a Coloured family will be described. Kanna 's son is studying in Canada and wants to lead the family to prosperity, but has to return because of a death in Cape Town, so that his dreams burst.
In September 2012, Small was awarded the prestigious Hertzog Prize, which is awarded for Afrikaans literature, for his stage plays.
Adam Small has four children from two marriages.