Miriam Tlali

Miriam Tlali
Born	11 November 1933 Doornfontein, Johannesburg
Nationality	South African
Genre	Fiction

Miriam Tlali (born 11 November 1933) is a South African novelist. She was the first black woman in South Africa to publish a novel, Muriel at Metropolitan, in 1979. She was also one of the first to write about Soweto.

Life and work

Miriam Masoli Tlali was born in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, and attended St Cyprian's Anglican School and then Madibane High School. She studied at the University of the Witwatersrand until it was closed to Blacks during the apartheid era; she later went to the University of Roma, Lesotho. She left there because of lack of funds, and became an office clerk.

Tlali's first book, Muriel at Metropolitan (1979; originally called Between Two Worlds), is a semi-autobiographical work and its "viewpoint is a new one in South African literature". She later wrote other books, inclusing Amandla (1980), Mihloti (1984), and Footprints in the Quag (1989).

Further reading

• Bernth Linfors and Reinhard Sander, Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, Detroit: Gale Research, 1996.
• Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jane Jolly, Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy 1970 - 1995, Cambridge (UK) and New York: Cambridge University Press (New York), 1998.
• Christina Cullhed, Grappling with Patriarchies: Narrative Strategies of Resistance in Miriam Tlali's Writings. Doctoral dissertation, 2006. Published by Uppsala University.
• Sarah Nuttall, "Literature and the Archive: The Biography of Texts", in Carolyn Hamilton (ed.), Refiguring the Archive, Cape Town: David Philip, 2002.