Stephen Gray

GRAY, Stephen (1941-) Immensely influential academic, literary historian, theatre reviewer, poet, novelist and playwright.

Training

Born in Cape Town, he went to high school at St Andrews College, Grahamstown, then completed a BA degree at the University of Cape Town , followed by a MA in English at Cambridge University (1964). Later, in 1969, he completed an MFA at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Returned to South Africa to become a lecturer and later professor of English at the Rand Afrikaans University (later called the University of Johannesburg) from 1970 to 1992. He retired as Professor Emeritus, becoming a freelance writer.

Over the years Gray has been a dramatic and literary advisor to numerous publishers, journals and theatre companies, and

His academic career

Gray followed in the footsteps of Guy Butler, to play an enormously influential role in establishing South African literature as a legitimate and exciting field of study and endeavour. He has been especially important as an obsessive literary archeologist, digging up unknown or little known facts and features of the South African literary landscape and has been a stalwart supporter of NELM and other archives and research centres.

Besides writing numerous academic studies on South African literature (his Southern African Literature: An Introduction - 1979 - being a seminal work at the time), as well as biographical and critical studies of a variety of authors (including important studies on Athol Fugard), he inspired young academics and writers and edited a wide range of anthologies of poetry, prose and plays. A prominent and prolific anthologist, Gray has also been responsible for rediscovering a number of long forgotten works and authors.

His impact on South African theatre

As anthologist

Notable among his literary discoveries have been a number of unpublished plays, which he he then collated and published in a number of collections , as well as his resurrection of the fortunes of the actor, director and playwright Stephen Black, whose works he edited and published in 1979, and the English prose writings of C. Louis Leipoldt.

Edited play collections

Theatre One (Ad Donker, 1975),

Theatre Two (1981),

Modern Stage Directions (with David Schalkwyk (1984)

The Market Theatre Plays (198*)

As performer

His work in theatre encompassed a period as performer for the Footlights, of Cambridge University, a company he apparently brought to South Africa in 19**. In Johannesburg he performed as an occasional reader of poetry in venues such as the Black Sun in Hillbrow.

As playwright

Full length plays:

Cold Stone Jug (1980), a play based on the prison diaries of Herman Charles Bosman.

Schreiner: A One Woman Play (1983)

Short radio plays:

Sources

Personal correspondence from Stephen Gray, 16 January, 2014

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