Lewis Nkosi, 1936-2010, left South Africa in 1961 to spend the next 30 years in exile after being denied leave to return. (Photo: Peter Schnetz)
1955 — To Herbert Dhlomo, poem published.
1958 — Athol Fugard’s No Good Friday, the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, Johannesburg: production team member.
1959 — Come Back Africa screenplay: co-writer with Bloke Modisane and Lionel Rogosin.
1961/62 — The Rhythm of Violence, stage play.
1962 — The Alien Corn, short story.
1962-1965 — BBC radio series Africa Abroad: producer, transcription centre
1962-1965 — NET radio series African Writers of Today, US: moderator and interviewer.
1963 — The Promise, short story.
1963 — The Hotel Room, short story.
1964 — Publishes The Rhythm of Violence (Oxford University Press).
1965 — Publishes Home and Exile: Critical Essays (London: Longman).
1966 — Receives the Dakar World Festival of Negro Arts Prize.
1967 — The Prisoner, short story.
1969 — The Trial, short story broadcast on BBC Radio.
1970 — His 1967 stage play, Malcolm, revised as Virgin Malcolm Look Not So Pale, and directed by Lionel Ngakane.
1971 — The London Bach Society, Goldsmith College performs Lewis Nkosi’s The Chameleon and the Lizard (with a Zulu libretto).
1975 — Publishes The Transplanted Heart: Essays on South Africa (Benin City: Ethiope Publishing Corporation).
1982 — Images of a Nation Yet to Be, poem.
1983 — Refugee Woman, poem.
1983 — Publishes the novel Mating Birds (Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House).1983 — The Black Psychiatrist, play, premieres at the Theatre Playhouse, Lusaka.
1986 — Mating Birds listed in the New York Times’ 100 best books published in 1986 and is Channel 4’s Book of the Week.
1987 — Receives the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for his novel, Mating Birds.
1994 — Flying Home!, play, sequel to The Black Psychiatrist.
1999 — Publishes The Mountain in Transition (Vol 79), Indiana University Press, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
2002 — Underground People, novel, Kwela, Cape Town.
2006 — Mandela’s Ego, novel, Umuzi.
2006 — Receives the Literary Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by the South African Literary Awards.
2013 — The Black Psychiatrist, staged at the Durban University of Technology Campus, directed by Professor Deborah Lutge.
Selected essays
Fiction by South Africans — first published in Black Orpheus (1966).
Alex La Guma: The Man and His Work — first published in The Transplanted Heart (1975).
Negritude: New and Old Perspectives — first published in Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1981).
White Writing — first published in Third World Quarterly (1989).
Bloke Modisane: Blame Me On History — first published in Southern Review of Books (1990).
The Republic of Letter After the Mandela Republic — first published in Journal of Literary Studies (December 2002).
Main sources
Stiebel, Lindy, and Gunner, Elizabeth. Still Beating the Drum: Critical Perspectives on Lewis Nkosi. Amsterdam: BRILL, 2005.
Starck-Adler, Astrid, and Henrichsen, Dag. Lewis Nkosi. The Black Psychiatrist | Flying Home!: Texts, Perspectives, Homage. Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Namibia Resource Centre & Southern Africa Library.
Nkosi, Lewis. Mating Birds Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2004.