Athol Fugard

Personal history
Athol Fugard was born as Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard, in Middelburg, Eastern Cape, South Africa, on 11 June 1932, to Irish and Afrikaner parents; his mother, Elizabeth Magdalena (née Potgieter), an Afrikaner, operated first a general store and then a lodging house; his father, Harold, was a disabled former jazz pianist of Irish, English and French Huguenot descent.[1][6][7] In 1935, his family moved to Port Elizabeth.[8] In 1938, he began attending primary school at Marist Brothers College, a private Catholic school founded by the Marist Brothers;[9] after being awarded a scholarship, he enrolled at a local technical college for secondary education and then studied Philosophy and Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town,[10] but he dropped out of the university in 1953, a few months before final examinations.[1] He left home, hitchhiked to North Africa with a friend, and then spent the next two years working in east Asia on a steamer ship, the SS Graigaur,[1] where he began writing, an experience "celebrated" in his 1999 autobiographical play The Captain's Tiger: a memoir for the stage.[11]
In September 1956, he married Sheila Meiring, a University of Cape Town Drama School student whom he had met the previous year.[1][12] Now known as Sheila Fugard, she is a novelist and poet. The Fugards' daughter, Lisa Fugard, is also a novelist.[13]
The Fugards moved to Johannesburg in 1958, where he worked as a clerk in a Native Commissioners' Court, which "made him keenly aware of the injustices of apartheid."[1] The political impetus of Fugard's plays brought him into conflict with the national government; to avoid prosecution, he had his plays produced and published outside South Africa.[12][14] A former alcoholic, Athol Fugard has been teetotal since the early 1980s.[15]
He and his wife live in San Diego, California,[16] where he teaches as an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting, and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at...