Craig Higginson was born in Zimbabwe, but grew up and was educated in South Africa. He studied at Wits and worked as Barney Simon’s assistant at the Market Theatre before moving to London, where he worked as a journalist and in the theatre, including a stint at the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2004 he returned to South Africa. Higginson now works as literary manager at the Market Theatre and as an editor. He has just won the Gold Sony Award for his BBC radio adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark.
Like his previous novel, Embodied Laughter (1998), his new book, The Hill (Jacana) is set among boys at school. In The Hill, however, they are younger and the focus is on one particular lad, his family relationships and the ambiguous interaction that develops between him and a teacher. It is a sensitive, well-told tale.
Describe yourself in a sentence.
Human beings are the only animals who invent pictures of what they want to be and then try to become them: like all of us, my pictures change every day; they have ranged from James Bond (generally when I was little, although I still have my moments) to an old man sitting contentedly in the sun.
Describe your book in a sentence.
The novel, which is set in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, follows a very tricky year in the life of a simple but endlessly resourceful boy called Andrew Hughes.
Describe your ideal reader.
Someone who is open to whatever the book has to offer.
What was the originating idea?
Books derive their existence from many sources. I started writing this one when I was living in England and missing home. I think I felt a certain nostalgia for a time of my life, and for a landscape, that I seemed to have moved away from forever — and I wanted to return there for a while. But I realised, once I had entered into that imagined land, that I was actually rewriting a story I had written when I was about 12 — before I had even known what a novel was. So perhaps I wanted to write the story I hadn’t had the tools or experience to do justice to back then. But books are mysterious creatures, and when I look at this one now I am not quite sure how it came about.
Describe the process of writing and publishing the book.
The first draft of The Hill was written over an intensive period of four months in England several years ago. I came back to it now and again and reworked it over the years. I sent it to an agent in England, who told me no one was interested in reading a book about a boy who goes to boarding school. This was just before Harry Potter mania consumed the planet. Last year I dusted off the manuscript and sent it to a few publishers. I got positive responses from all those who actually read it and I chose Jacana.
One element of the research is worth mentioning. When I wrote the first draft, I developed a kind of personal mythology for Andrew in which certain animals in that landscape, for example, represented certain things. When I later went to the British Library and dug up 19th-century oral testimonies from the last surviving Drakensberg San, I found that what I had written resonated in all sorts of unexpected ways with their mythology. A coincidence? Perhaps. But it led me to think that there might not be such a difference, after all, between those long-departed people and ourselves. Our affinities as human beings across time and space run deep, but only when we are alive to them.
Name some writers who have inspired you and tell us why or how.
Many writers have inspired me but two of the stronger influences behind The Hill, in terms of novels, are Lord of the Flies and Death in Venice — as anyone who reads it would perhaps pick up. The two writers I was conscious of being indebted to during the writing were Bruce Chatwin (I wanted to write a slim, poetic book in which not a word was wasted) and Graham Greene (I wanted to present the scenes dramatically, sticking to dialogue and description and reducing the narrator’s voice, so that the reader could be given space to form his or her own opinions).
What are you reading at the moment?
Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler.
Do you write by hand, or use a typewriter or computer?
I use a computer — strange at first, but when you’re on a roll you feel like a concert pianist!
What is the purpose of fiction?
It can be whatever you need it to be: entertainment, stimulant, antidepressant — or depressant! — companion, lover, antagonist … Through books, people speak to us and we are taken to places we never knew existed. The possibilites of fiction are at once limited and infinite. I can’t define its purpose, I can only assert its importance.
Is there anything you wish to add?
I think it is criminal that books cost what they do here. How can we expect people to read when books cost four times more than a movie ticket? In England, paperback novels and films cost about the same. That is as it should be. My publisher has made my novel considerably less expensive than some, but we have a long way to go, and it is not only down to the publishers: the government also needs to help.