The Mail & Guardian is running a series of interviews with South African authors. We posed difficult questions; we also asked some easy ones. Zukiswa Wanner takes up the challenge.
Describe yourself in a sentence.
Tried to do a sentence, but failed dismally. I do have a word though. Misunderstood.
Describe your ideal reader.
Human, above 16, who is literate (I can also work with functional illiterates).
What are you working on?
Just finished writing and editing book three, Men of the South, out in June 2010.
Tell us about your everyday writing routine.
I sleep at 7.30pm, wake up at midnight, and write through the night. Then I wake up, bathe, feed and take my son to creche at seven, return home and take a shower. Sleep until midday, and wake up to take phone calls from wonderful journalists like you at 11 and then respond to emails until four when I pick up my son from creche.
Which book(s) are you reading now?
I am reading Imraan Coovadia’s High, low, In-between.
Do you remember the first novel you read?
Yup. George Orwell’s Animal Farm when I was 11. I regret it because it made me a cynical socialist (Ã la Benjamin).
What book, if any, changed your life?
Every book I read changes my life because it teaches me how or how not to write.
Do you write by hand, typewriter or computer?
It’s not writing if it’s done with a computer or a typewriter. in other words I probably don’t qualify to be a writer because I do everything on my laptop.
Why should people buy your book as a gift this holiday?
Because if they are Jo’burgers I can probably arrange to autograph it for them (and one day when I am dead my signature will probably be worth a lot of money), but if they are not, then they will have some good laughs about the mad habits of Jo’burgers.
Which book(s) are you buying as presents?
Definitely Thando Mgolozana’s A Man who’s Not a Man; the above-mentioned book that I am currently reading by Coovadia, Angela Makholwa’s The 30th Candle; Shameless by Futhi Ntshingila and On Black Sisters’ Street by Chika Unigwe for all my streetwalker friends. For my BEE friends under 25 I will get Fiona Snyckers’s Trinity Rising; I am getting my rugby-playing mates Joost and John Smit’s bios and I am getting me Zakes’s latest, which I have not bought so I can do it in flourish when he comes for his South African launch.
Which CD are you listening to now?
Huh?
In a multi/polymedia world, why is book publishing still important?
Because publishers, editors and owners of publishing houses need a salary. Is unemployment not high enough without taking the poor sods’ bread from their mouths?
What subject is now passe in current South Africa?
Woodwork (I swear this is not me taking a cheap Julius shot).
Zukiswa Wanner was born in 1976 in Lusaka, Zambia, to an exiled South African father and a Zimbabwean mother. After Zimbabwean independence, she lived in Zimbabwe and was schooled there. She attended Hawai’i Pacific University in Hawaii for her undergraduate studies, and now resides and works in what she describes as the cultural capital of the world — Johannesburg. Wanner has published two novels, The Madams and Behind Every Successful Man.