South Africa the first well known novels written by a black author in an African language was Solomon Thekiso Plaatje's "Mhudi", written in 1930. During the 1950s, "Drum" magazine became a hotbed of political satire, fiction, and essays, giving a voice to urban black culture. Notable white South African authors include Alan Paton, who published the novel "Cry, the Beloved Country" in 1948. Nadine Gordimer became the first South African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1991. JM Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2003. When awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy stated that Coetzee "in innumerable
Cry, the Beloved Country (1995 film) become so invested in the unleashing of violent emotion and the escalation of hostility, that expressions of restraint, reconciliation and forgiveness can easily be read as corny cop-outs. "Cry, the Beloved Country" is not corny, and it doesn't cop out." Conversely, Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" had a less positive view of the film, giving it only two and half out of four stars, and commenting, "The film has genuine qualities. Its photography and tone evoke a South Africa that is indeed beloved by its inhabitants ('If the climate and the landscape were not so beautiful, we would have