Born in Birmingham, England in 1932, Sheila Meiring moved with her parents to South Africa, in 1940, when she was eight years old.
[1] In 1972, when she was 40 years old, Sheila Fugard published her first novel, The Castaways, which won the Olive Schreiner Prize.
A Revolutionary Woman, her best-known novel, takes place in the 1920s in the Karoo district of South Africa and tells the story of a female disciple of Mahatma Gandhi who gets entangled in a rape case between a young colored boy and a young retarded Boer girl.
Rite of Passage concerns a doctor and a young boy traumatized by a tribal circumcision ceremony.
[citation needed] Athol Fugard acted in the BBC adaptation of her novel The Castaways.