Chris Mann - a short biography and bibliography of this KwaZulu-Natal author.
Chris Mann
(1948 - ) was born in Port Elizabeth. Chris Mann was awarded
an honary D Litt
degree from the University of Durban-Westville and was a
Rhodes scholar at Oxford where he was awarded the
Newdigate Prize for
Poetry. He spent over a decade in rural and peri-urban
development work in
KwaZulu-Natal until the mid 1990s when he moved to
Grahamstown to take up
the position of Operations Director of the Grahamstown
Foundation. His rural
development work has led to contact with a wide variety of
fellow South
Africans and has also provided practical experience of
labour-intensive
public works, event management, formal and informal
education and the
promotion of the arts. His writing is also influenced by
the use of
different South African languages. Chris Mann writes
poetry for the page,
for performance, and for multi-media presentations using
the graphics of
modern technology. He also writes plays in verse for the
radio and stage.
The artist, Julia Skeen, to whom Chris is married,
produces the graphics for
the presentations, as well as for his painting-poems in
Horn of Plenty.
In 1998, Mann started (with others)
Wordfest, a
national multi-lingual festival of languages &
literatures with a
developmental emphasis which takes place annually at the
Grahamstown
Festival. Chris spends part of each year on the road,
presenting programmes
of poetry work to schools, university and adult groups,
using slides
projected onto a portable screen. He also wrote and
performed the
song-lyrics in Zulu and English for Zabalaza, a cross-over
band and winner
of the SATV's 'Follow that Star'. Chris Mann has received
many awards,
including the Olive Schreiner Prize for S.A. Poetry, and
SA Performing Arts
Councils Playwright of the Year.
(From the Poetry Africa 2002 Biographies, Centre for
Creative Arts,
University of KwaZulu-Natal).
Selected WorkGranadilla. From Horn of Plenty.
(including Julia Skeen's illustration)
I can remember a Christmas in the Drakensberg
whose grey seraphic crags
Lifted the riddle of serenity
and placed it high
above the sprawl of human habitation.
I was a student of Zulu literature
equipped with sleeping-bag and tape-recorder
traipsing around the foothills
in search of a clan's epic poem.
The grey-headed imbongi I'd come to record
had lost a hand on the Reef
was stretched on a sleeping-mat
unwilling to perform
but asked about work
he stood and shaking the stump of his arm
cursed the mine in a rage.
That was I suppose
an epic poem of a sort
the textbooks had yet to enshrine.
As for the granadillas
a vine of them flourished along his fence
the pods leathery and wrinkled
the skins flaking.
The juice in those he offered me
was nearly dry
but the seeds were there alright
hard
bitter
black and live. Bibliography1977. First Poems.
1984. New Shades.
1990. Kites.
1992. Mann Alive.
1996. South Africans.
1997. Horn of Plenty. (Illustrated by Julia Skeen)
2002. Heartlands. See
here for
reviews
of Heartlands. - Pietermaritzburg -
- Index -
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