Sheila Meiring Fugard

Born in Birmingham, England in 1932, Sheila Meiring moved with her parents to South Africa, in 1940, when she was eight years old. She went to the University of Cape Town, where she wrote short stories and studied theatre.

She met playwright Athol Fugard when she acted in one of his plays. In September 1956, she married Fugard and adopted his surname.[1]

In 1972, when she was 40 years old, Sheila Fugard published her first novel, The Castaways, which won the Olive Schreiner Prize. Subsequently, she published other novels, including Rite of Passage, in 1976, and A Revolutionary Woman, in 1983. A Revolutionary Woman, her best-known novel, takes place in the 1920s in the Karoo district of South Africa and tells the story of a female disciple of Mahatma Gandhi who gets entangled in a rape case between a young colored boy and a young retarded Boer girl. Rite of Passage concerns a doctor and a young boy traumatized by a tribal circumcision ceremony.

Fugard has also published collected poems, including Threshold, in 1975, and Mystic Things, in 1981.

Athol Fugard acted in the BBC adaptation of her novel The Castaways. Their daughter, Lisa Fugard, who has acted in some of her father's plays, such as My Children! My Africa!, has also written a novel.

• "Sheila Fugard" (Index of articles) at Highbeam.com.