Mongane Wally Serote, National Poet Laureate of South Africa

Mongane Wally Serote, the National Poet Laureate of South Africa, will be at the Salt Lake City Public Library on Wednesday, October 28, for a talk and a short reading. He'll be in the Nancy Tessman Auditorium, which is off campus, from 7 PM to 8:30 PM.

Serote was born in 1944 and spent years as a poet and novelist active against the apartheid regime. He was detained without trial and held in solitary confinement under the Terrorism Act. After earning an MFA at Columbia University on a Fulbright scholarship, he was barred from reentering South Africa and lived in exile in Botswana and London before returning in 1990. A member of the African National Congress, he was elected to Parliament in the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela's government.

His talk commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Soweto uprising. He'll draw on his friendship with Steve Biko and other members of the Black Consciousness Movement and consider parallels to the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements. It's a chance to hear from someone who lived through the era he's talking about.

If you're not familiar with his writing, he's published poetry collections including Yakhal'inkomo (1972), No Baby Must Weep (1975), Third World Express (1992), and History Is the Home Address (2004), and novels To Every Birth Its Blood (1981) and Revelations (2011). He's won the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize, and the Chilean government's Pablo Neruda Award. The event runs from 7 PM to 8:30 PM at the Salt Lake City Public Library's Nancy Tessman Auditorium.