Background
Sydney Sipho Sepamla was born on September 22, 1932 in Krugersdorp, Mogale City Local Municipality, South Africa.
1981
Sipho Sepamla (left) and Antonio Skármeta, 1981
Sipho Sepamla studied teaching at Pretoria Normal College (now the University of Pretoria).
Sydney Sipho Sepamla was born on September 22, 1932 in Krugersdorp, Mogale City Local Municipality, South Africa.
Sipho Sepamla studied teaching at Pretoria Normal College (now the University of Pretoria), prior to attending drama school in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. During this period, he published his first volume of poetry "Hurry Up to It!" in 1975.
Sipho Sepamla lived most of his life in Soweto, a township near Johannesburg. His poetry has been collected in the volumes "Hurry Up to It!" (1975); "The Soweto I Love" (1977), which was banned by the apartheid government; and "Selected Poems" (1984).
His poems are also featured in the anthologies "The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry" (1989) and "Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness" (1993). His fiction includes "A Ride on the Whirlwind: A Novel of Soweto" (1981) and "Rainbow Journey" (1996).
Sepamla was a founder of the Federated Union of Black Artists (now the Fuba Academy of Arts). He also served as an editor for the literary journal "The New Classic" and the theater magazine S’ketsh’.
Sipho Sepamla died on January 9, 2007 in Brakpan Gauteng, South Africa.
In 1976 and 1977 Sepamla became a member of Medupe Writers Association. He also served as a member of the government’s Arts and Culture Task Group post 1994.