Describe yourself in a sentence.
I am a zany teacher of English with a passion for photographic images, films, reading, running marathons and snowboarding.
Describe your book in a sentence.
Karoo Boy is the story of a boy’s hazardous journey to manhood in a country at once cruel and beautiful.
Describe your ideal reader.
One like my son, Finn, who utterly loses himself in a story.
What was the originating idea for the book?
My agent, Isobel Dixon, asked me out of the blue (over a Mojito in a Mexican bar in Frankfurt) what my next book would be. I had just finished writing Blood Orange (my first book, which is part memoir and part fiction — still unpublished). For a moment I was stumped, but then the rum wove its magic and I began to tell her the story of Karoo Boy. Isobel thought it a good story. Catch was, I was then forced to write it, rumlessly.
Describe the process of writing. How long did it take?
The book was written fugitively in cafes in Frankfurt and Vienna, in sporadic, guilt-ridden moments of neglecting fatherhood and marking papers. I have no distinct sense of how long it took. At times it unravelled effortlessly … Then a fortnight or longer went by before I found my way into the story again.
Name some writers who have inspired you, and tell us why.
Ernest Hemingway: the whittled-down, pencil-sketch, graphic prose of his short stories in In Our Time. Seamus Heaney: the tactile, sensuous fabric of his honed, handled words. Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country was the novel that stirred me to write of Africa.
What are you reading at the moment?
A German novel, Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, by Uwe Timm, about a Hamburg woman who hides a deserter in her flat during the war. When the war is over, she does not tell him. Magic.
Do you write by hand, or use a typewriter or computer?
I write by hand on the back of the free postcards you find in cafés, then type that out on my laptop later.
What is the purpose of fiction?
To lure you into another world, colour the way you see your world.
Is there anything you wish to add?
I wrote Karoo Boy partly as a reply to Disgrace, as I found JM Coetzee’s South Africa relentlessly bleak. I have not shied away from violence and cruelty, but have focused on a sensuous, filmic evocation of South Africa, ending on a note of hope. Coetzee writes of Africa with a scalpel. I write [of it] with a stubby, chewed pencil.