Peter Nazareth Biography

Ugandan novelist, critic, and dramatist, born in Kampala, educated at Uganda's Makerere University College and the University of Leeds. Following a period in public service in Uganda, the success of In a Brown Mantle (1972), his first novel, gained him a Seymour Lustman Fellowship at Yale University. In 1973 he began teaching at the University of Iowa, where he became Associate Professor of English in 1980. Nazareth first achieved notice as a dramatist, his play Brave New Cosmos, contained in Origin East Africa (edited by David Cook, 1965), being the first work by a Ugandan dramatist to be broadcast by the BBC's African service. His other plays, which have been chiefly performed on radio, include The Hospital (1976) and X (1976). A second novel, The General is Up, appeared in 1984. Nazareth's creative and critical works have in common their urgent concern with the vulnerability and cultural and economic potential of Africa and the Third World during the immediate post-colonial era. His critical writings, which include Literature and Society in Modern Africa (1972), An African View of Literature (1974), The Footnote Man (1980), and Literature of the African People (1984), confront the ethical assumptions of much contemporary African writing.