Fugard was born in Middelburg in South Africa in 1932 to an Afrikaner mother and English father. He grew up in Port Elizabeth, and began studying at the University of Cape Town before he dropped out in 1953 and hitchhiked north to Port Said, where he enlisted as a merchant sea man. He returned to South Africa a year later, and worked as a journalist, court clerk and stage manager. His court work exposed him at first hand to the evil of the apartheid system. In 1956 he married Sheila Meiring, an actress, and in 1957 they moved to Johannesburg where, in the legendary township of Sophiatown, they met a remarkable group of black writers, actors and musicians with whom Fugard collaborated in the production of his early plays.

Late in 1959 the couple sailed to London so that Fugard could widen his theatrical experience. By the end of September 1960 the twenty-seven-year-old writer had begun work on a novel whose main character was to be a tsotsi, the Afrikaans term for a hoodlum or a thug. In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre, however, and after Sheila became pregnant with their daughter Lisa, the Fugards decided to return home. In December they embarked on the Stirling Castle at Southampton. On the journey to the Cape, Fugard made a sequence of luminous notes about his novel-inprogress. Back in South Africa, he continued to work on the book, writing in longhand on scrap paper, the backs of stock inventories from Cyril Lord Carpets (where Sheila had a job in London), old roneoed lists of Chubby Checker and Cliff Richard record sales, and even on gala programs from the swimming pool in Port Elizabeth where his mother ran a café. A single page of the manuscript of Tsotsi is on a Dairy Maid Ice Cream Products order form.

At the same time, Fugard was finishing and directing his play The Blood Knot. It had its first performance in Johannesburg in September 1961 and subsequently toured South Africa for six months. The London publisher André Deutsch, on one of his regular trips to Africa, saw a per formance and approached Fugard. Did he have a novel? Fugard went back to Tsotsi until 14 May 1962, when he described its abandonment:

My novel (à la Beckett) is no more. Read what I had written to Sheila. Her silence—my own feelings as I went from one muddled paragraph to another, were enough. I tore it up. I don’t consider the work wasted. The characters are with me now. They’ll come out one day. In any case, this business of writing ‘prose’ because a publisher is interested is fundamentally wrong. I am a playwright.

Later, Fugard confirmed that he did not think Tsotsi ‘was worth publishing and did not show or submit it to anyone’. But, at the urging of Sheila, he didn’t destroy it completely. The novel, surviving now in several drafts, was consigned to a suitcase, and its author forgot all about it.

In the mid-1970s a complete draft of Tsotsi was among the papers packed off to the Fugard archive at the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown. By 1978 a handful of people had stumbled on it; one of them, a researcher named Stephen Gray, suggested it should be edited for publication. Fugard gave his cautious permis sion, and Gray got to work, cutting the text by as much as 20 per cent. In late 1979 Fugard read Tsotsi for the first time in almost twenty years, and approved its publication. It appeared, to acclaim, the following year in South Africa, the US and the UK. The lost classic had been found.