Background
Patrick Cullinan was born on May 21, 1932, in Pretoria, South Africa, into a significant diamond-mining family (his grandfather, Sir Thomas Cullinan, a diamond mine owner, gave his name to the Cullinan Diamond).
Patrick Cullinan was born on May 21, 1932, in Pretoria, South Africa, into a significant diamond-mining family (his grandfather, Sir Thomas Cullinan, a diamond mine owner, gave his name to the Cullinan Diamond).
Patrick attended Charterhouse School and Oxford University in England (where he read Italian and Russian).
After Patrick's studies, he returned to South Africa, where he worked as a sawmill owner and farmer in the Eastern Transvaal. With Lionel Abrahams, he founded the Bateleur Press in 1974, and the literary journal The Bloody Horse: Writings and the Arts in 1980. Through the journal Cullinan sought to re-establish the standing of poetry in South Africa.
Cullinan believed that it was "the fanatical belief that politics is more important than art" which was slowing the process of South African poetry becoming "more sophisticated" and "less provincial": a limitation which he hoped the "New South Africa" after the first democratic elections in 1994 would remove.
Cullinan accepted the fact that writers ought to have been involved in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, while acknowledging the fact that is it difficult to produce a satisfactory political poem.
Quotations: To talk of 'literature', of good writing, of art may be obscene or almost obscene in a society as self-destructing, engrossed in conflict as this one is. But the important word is almost. For however cluttered by violence and potential annihilation a society may find itself, it is the writers and the artists who portray the reality of this process... There are multiple ways of telling the truth."