Background
Nortje was born in Oudtshoorn and went to school in Portuguese Elizabeth, where he was taught by the acclaimed writer Dennis Brutus.
Nortje was born in Oudtshoorn and went to school in Portuguese Elizabeth, where he was taught by the acclaimed writer Dennis Brutus.
After school he studied at the University College of the Western Cape and later received a scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford in the United Kingdom, where he obtained a Bachelor degree.
He emigrated to Canada in 1967, teaching in Hope, British Columbia and Toronto but returned to Oxford in 1970 to work on a doctorate. He died shortly afterwards of a drug overdose. His poems were published posthumously in the collections Dead Roots (1973) and Lonely Against the Light (1973).
They deal extensively with his own personal alienation, being classified as coloured in apartheid South Africa, and his experiences of exile.
In 2000, the University of South Africa Press in Pretoria published Anatomy of Dark: Collected Poems of Arthur Nortje.