SA playwright wins international prize

AWARD South African playwright, cultural activist and associate professor of drama at the University of Cape Town, Mike van Graan (above), was awarded the 2018 Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture, “for his contribution to the fight against apartheid, to building a post-apartheid society and to the study of the interface between peace and culture in his home country and across the African continent”. The Hiroshima Foundation prize was created in 1989 following a bequest by the Swedish author Edita Morris who was married to the American author Ira Morris. It is named after Edita Morris’ most famous novel, The Flowers of Hiroshima. Van Graan is the second South African to win the award; playwright and theatre director John Kani received it in 1998.