Modise Sekgothe

BIO

Modise Sekgothe is an award winning writer and performer, interested in the exploration of poetry as it relates to music, theatre and the visual arts.

Driven by cross-genre collaboration and solo exploration, his impulse is to stretch the bounds around how poetry can be written and performed, as well as the contexts within which it can be found. Much of his work is concerned with the contemplation of meaning, as a spiritual and existential question, and the implications of this on politics and philosophy.

Sekgothe is winner of the 2025 Standard Bank Young Artist for poetry and an international slam champion, having won the 2016 Spoken Poetry Slam competition in Washington DC. He has also won the Word N Sound Innovation in Poetry Award in two consecutive years (2015 and 2016), the WNS Best Showcase Award in 2013 and 2014 as well as the WNS Perfect Poem Award in 2015.

He has performed on stages across South Africa and internationally, including the Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Poets For Puerto Rico, Art All Night Festival, The Kennedy Center, Gothenburg Book Fair, Nobel Dialogue Week, and the Brussels Planetarium Poetry Festival.

His work has been published in Home Is Where The Mic Is, a performance poetry anthology by Botsotso Publishers as well as Race, Revolution and Rapture: Voices Raised For Rights, published by UKZN Press.

On the audio front, he has released several lauded poetry and music projects, namely: DIPOKO tsa DIPOKO, The Wilderness, Metropolar and a solo album Meera Me, which is also a multimedia production that merges documentary and live performance through music and spoken word poetry to explore the multi-layered experience of love and its entanglement with loss.

His award-winning multimedia collaborative project Metropolar is a marriage of spoken-word poetry, music and animation, exploring the contrasting realities of life in the Johannesburg CBD.

As a multi-disciplinary artist, he aims to continue collaborating with artists across disciplines to explore the many ways in which the word can be interpreted and experienced in the realms of sound and performance.