Award-winning author and television scriptwriter K Sello Duiker was found hanged in Johannesburg on Wednesday night.
Before his death, Duiker had been working as a commissioning editor for drama for the South African Broadcasting Corporation.
Duiker had previously been employed as a scriptwriter for e.tv’s Backstage drama series.
Duiker’s first novel, Thirteen Cents, a grim story exploring the life of Cape Town’s street people, attracted considerable publicity and won a 2001 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
He then published a second novel, The Quiet Violence of Dreams — a much more ambitious book, both thematically and in terms of its length (more than 400 pages).
The Quiet Violence of Dreams was set again in Cape Town — both in townships and wealthy areas.
It explored the life of Tshepo, born into a relatively wealthy family, traumatised by the killing of his mother by his mobster father, turning to drugs and incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. As the novel proceeded, though, Tshepo found a new sense of himself, a sense of his own worth that included recognising his homosexuality, and a startling vision of the realities of the new South Africa.
In 2001, Duiker told the Mail & Guardian about The Quiet Violence: “I had lived in Cape Town for two years and had been to many places. I felt that writing a multivocal narrative would allow me to try and capture the varied sense of geography that Cape Town has and all the stories and characters that come with a particular place.”
The Quiet Violence of Dreams won the 2001 Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Literature.
Born in Soweto in 1974, Duiker spent most of his childhood there before he moved to East London.
He graduated from Rhodes University with majors in journalism and art history, according to Kwela publisher’s website.
Kwela chose not to comment on Thursday when contacted by the M&G Online, saying a press release would be sent out later.