Kobus Moolman

Kobus Moolman (born 1964) is a South African writer and academic. He has published ten volumes of poetry, plays for stage and radio, and a collection of short stories. He has won the Ingrid Jonker Prize, the South African Literary Award for poetry, and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. He was runner-up for the BBC African Performance radio drama competition and has won two Performing Arts Network of South Africa (PANSA) awards.

Life Moolman was born in 1965 in a working-class suburb of Pietermaritzburg. He holds a Masters degree in English, an Honours degree in Drama Studies, and a PhD, all from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban.

He worked as an English teacher, a sub-editor on The Natal Witness, and as head of the Education Department at the Tatham Art Gallery in Pietermaritzburg.

He lives with his wife in Riebeek West.

In 2010, he published the collection Light and After. Published in the same year as Tilling the Soil, his anthology of work by South African writers living with disabilities, Light and After is his first collection to directly address his own spina bifida, and the relationship between the body and experimental poetics which would become central to his later work. It was shortlisted for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.

His 2014 collection, A Book of Rooms, won the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. The collection examines Moolman's personal experience of growing up as a white South African during apartheid, and of living with Spina bifida.

Drama Moolman has written plays for radio and for stage. He won a BBC African Radio Theatre Award in 1987 and the Macmillan Southern African Playwriting Award in 1991.

The script for his stage play, Full Circle, won the jury prize at the 2004 PANSA Festival for New Writing. The play premiered at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2005 and was later staged in Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg, and as part of the Southern African theatre season at the Oval House Theatre in London in 2006.

In 2007, his play Stone Angels was awarded joint first prize in the PANSA Festival. The play premiered at the 2008 National Arts Festival in Grahamstown and was subsequently performed at the Square Space Theatre in Durban.

Published works

Poetry Time like Stone (2000) Feet of the Sky (2003) Separating the Seas (2007) Anatomy (2008) Light and After (2010) Left Over (2013) A Book of Rooms (2014) All and Everything (2019) The Mountain behind the House (2020) Fall Risk (2024)

Story collections The Swimming Lesson and Other Stories (2017)

Radio plays Blind Voices (2007)

Stage plays Full Circle (2003) Stone Angels (2007)

Edited collections Tilling the Hard Soil: Poetry and Prose by South African Writers Living with Disabilities (2010) Cutting Carrots the Wrong Way (2017) Notes from the Body: Health, Illness, Trauma with Duncan Brown and Nkosinathi Sithole (2023)