Tom Eaton

I often start bits of fiction at the end: an image or a more complete climax sticks with me for a few weeks or months, and then I try to work out how to arrive at that final image. With The Wading I had an image and a conclusion in mind, a particular fate for Muller (one of the two main characters). That conclusion disappeared during the rewrite of the novel, which improved it, but I was happy with the process up to that point, so the rest stayed.

As for the tone and mood as a whole, I've always enjoyed quiet decay, when the natural world takes back spaces that have been abandoned by people. 

Cape Formosa was more or less intact in my mind from the outset. It's a conglomeration of many places - the Overberg, images I've seen of the Caribbean, parts of South America, and perhaps the South Pacific. I've always associated those places with a comforting decay, where people make do but are ultimately being quietly shunted to the sideline, and where each summer finds the beaches an inch further inland, and the weeds a foot taller. 

Futhi Ntshingila, visiting her home town for the launch of her first novel.

“It comes from my personal experience – some very personal,” says Ntshingila. “I was a teenager of 14 when we had to move to a less conflicted area – and change from a rural life to a semi-urban one.” Hard on all involved, an event like that is particularly traumatic in those already problematic teenage years.

But Ntshingila, who matriculated at Georgetown High, projects no aura of victimhood, nor do her characters, despite their often difficult lives. Thandiwe works as a prostitute in Yeoville. “I make sure the people I write about aren’t victims,” says Ntshingila. “It’s too easy to label people - their thoughts and feelings may well not be what we assume them to be.”

author of Home Affairs.

1.  When did you first start writing?
As soon as I knew how! I used to keep diaries and journals as a child (and still do) and was forever scribbling down notes, phrases and fragments of sentences or thoughts and ideas that came to me. I would also write down words that I’d read that I either didn’t know the meaning of or wanted to use in the future. My first ever professional writing was copy for my father’s advertising agency while I was still at school and I have written professionally in one form or another for most of my working life, although only latterly have I started to write books.  

2. What do you love most about writing?
I love the idea that letters can be arranged into words, and those words, in turn, arranged into phrases that conjure up so many images in the mind of a reader and evoke such an intense range of emotional responses. I am always delighted when a book makes me cry or laugh out loud, and I love the idea that rather like musical composition, it was a particular arrangement of words in a very specific order that elicited that response. I have always loved the written word and adore writing in all its forms, and I still think that an artfully penned letter is a beautiful thing to write and a lasting and lovely thing to receive. 

Translator of Professor Sibusiso Nyembezi's The Rich Man of Pietermaritzburg.

Inkinsela yaseMgungundlovu (The Rich Man of Pietermaritzburg) by Pietermaritzburg’s Professor Sibusiso Nyembezi has long been regarded as one of the best novels ever written in Zulu. It has been a school setwork, was a popular radio series in the 1970s, adapted for television in the 1980s and on the list of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century that appeared in 2002. But there has never been an English language version.

That is now being put right, with a paperback edition coming from British publisher, Aflame Books, who are an independent publishing house bringing out English translations of works from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East; books that have been hidden from the English-speaking world by the barriers of culture and language. Aflame published a collection called Poems for Mandela, and one of the contributors was Johannesburg-based journalist and writer Sandile Ngidi. “I approached them about the possibility of doing a translation,“ he says, explaining that he has been amazed by the number of people who ask him where they can get hold of translations of classic African language books.