Dennis Vincent Brutus was born 28 November 1924, in Harare, Zimbabwe (then Salisbury,Southern Rhodesia), and was a South African activist and poet. He died at his home in Cape Town of prostate cancer on 26 December 2009.

A graduate of the University of Fort Hare and the University of the Witwatersrand, Brutus was formerly on the faculty of the University of Denver and Northwestern University.

Brutus was an activist against the apartheid government of South Africa in the 1960s. He campaigned to get South Africa suspended from the Olympic Games; this eventually led to the country's expulsion from the games in 1970. He joined the Anti-Coloured Affairs Department organisation (Anti-CAD), a group that organised against the Coloured Affairs Department which was an attempt by the government to institutionalise divisions between blacks and coloureds. He was arrested in 1963 and jailed for 18 months on Robben Island.

Brutus was forbidden to teach, write and publish in South Africa. His first collection of poetry, Sirens, Knuckles and Boots, was published in Nigeria while he was in prison. The book received the Mbari Poetry Prize, awarded to a black poet of distinction, but Brutus turned it down on the grounds of its racial exclusivity.

After he was released, Brutus fled South Africa. In 1983, Brutus won the right to stay in the United States as a political refugee, after a protracted legal struggle. He continued to participate in protests against the apartheid government while teaching in the United States. He was "unbanned" by the South African government in 1990. He was the Professor Emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to South Africa and was based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal where he often contributed to the annual Poetry Africa Festival hosted by the University and supported activism against neo-liberal policies in contemporary South Africa through working with NGOs. In December 2007, Brutus was to be inducted into the South African Sports Hall of Fame. At the induction ceremony, Brutus publicly turned down his nomination, stating, "It is incompatible to have those who championed racist sport alongside its genuine victims. It's time-indeed long past time-for sports truth, apologies and reconciliation."

According to fellow writer Olu Oguibe, interim Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut, "Brutus was arguably Africa's greatest and most influential modern poet after Leopold Sedar Senghor and Christopher Okigbo, certainly the most widely-read, and no doubt among the world's finest poets of all time. More than that, he was a fearless campaigner for justice, a relentless organizer, an incorrigible romantic, and a great humanist and teacher."

Brutus died in his sleep on 26 December 2009.

Bibliography

* Sirens Knuckles and Boots (Mbari Productions, 1963).
* Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison (Heinemann, 1968).
* Poems from Algiers(African and Afro-American Studies and Research Institute, 1970).
* A Simple Lust (Heinemann, 1973).
* China Poems (African and Afro-American studies and Research Centre, 1975).
* Stubborn Hope (Three Continents Press/Heinemann, 1978).
* Salutes and Censures (Fourth Dimension, 1982).
* Airs & Tributes (Whirlwind Press, 1989).
* Still the Sirens (Pennywhistle Press, 1993).
* Remembering Soweto, ed. Lamont B. Steptoe (Whirlwind Press, 2004).
* Leafdrift, ed. Lamont B. Steptoe (Whirlwind Press, 2005).
* Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader (Haymarket Books, 2006).