Poet Profile: Rethabile Masilo

Rethabile Masilo | January 13th, 2021 | poet profile | No Comments

RETHABILE MASILO is a Mosotho poet who has lived in France for more than 30 years. He left his country, Lesotho, as a refugee in 1981, eventually ending up in the USA where he continued his biology studies. He moved to France in 1987 and has lived there ever since, effecting as many visits to Lesotho as possible.

He has published four books of poetry as well as two poetry anthologies that he was editor of. In 2014 his poem ‘Swimming’, from his second book Waslap won the Dalro First Prize in poetry, as well as the Thomas Pringle Award for Poetry in South African periodicals a year later. The poem had first appeared in the magazine New Coin, Vol. 49 Number 1, in June 2013.

In 2016 the same collection of poems, Waslap, published by The Onslaught Press a year earlier, was awarded The Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. That same year in October he was invited to participate in the 20th Poetry Africa Festival in Durban, where he also represented The World Poetry Movement; and in June 2019 he was part of The International Poetry Festival of Medellin in Colombia, to whose 30th anniversary festival in 2020 he has been invited.

Masilo’s books are ‘Things that are silent’ (Pindrop Press, 2012), ‘Waslap’ (The Onslaught Press, 2015), ‘Letter to country’ (Canopic Publishing, 2016), and ‘Qoaling’ (The Onslaught Press, 2018). He blogs at Poéfrika (poefrika.blogspot.com) and co-edits Canopic Jar
(canopicpublishing.com/blog) with the writer Phil Rice. He is currently writing poems toward a fifth volume dedicated to his brother, who lost his life at the hands of the then Lesotho government in the late 1970s.

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