Athol Fugard

Athol Fugard, who lived from June 11, 1932, to March 8, 2025, is widely regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright; Time magazine called him in 1985 the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world. His politically charged plays confronted the human dimensions of racial injustice during and after apartheid, and over his career he wrote more than thirty of them, including Blood Knot (1961), considered his first major dramatic achievement, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973), both co-created with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, The Road to Mecca (1984), and "Master Harold"...and the Boys (1982), generally regarded as his most acclaimed work. His novel Tsotsi was adapted into a 2005 film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and he received a Special Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011.