A Strange and Sublime process - aesthetic choices in fiction
25th, Nov 2013Our aesthetic choices as writers often happen under the radar; we are only dimly aware we are making them, even as we draw upon their elusive power.
Blog
Tracking - a new project
21st, Oct 2013'Tracking' is a new project about learning to track animals, and more broadly about becoming a Trails guide - someone who takes people on guided nature walks in the African bush.
Flamingoes and flip-flop flotsam - Indian ocean diaries
28th, Sep 2013‘Come on, how many Flamingoes do you see?’ The challenge comes from Colin Jackson, the research director at A Rocha Kenya. A group of us stand with our magnifying scopes and binoculars, bristling into the heat.
The Logic of Summer - summer idyll novels
25th, Aug 2013A student of mine on the Masters in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia once summarised her idea for a new novel as ‘A house, a lake, a summer. That’s all I know.’
A house, a lake, summer. What more could be required for a novel?
Two Africas – Alexandria to Cape Town
07th, Jul 2013Alexandria – this must be the most beautiful name for a city. Poised on the northernmost rim of Africa, it is a place I have been to only through literature, and through a literary and family association buried in official secrecy – but that is another story.
Anna Kavan – a unique modernist vision
04th, Jul 2013Being a writer is one of those no-guarantee professions: there are no guarantees that you will get published and, if you do, that you will be read and understood.
Tracking - animal phantoms and rhino poachers in South Africa’s Far North
15th, Jun 2013An extended version of this article is now published on the literary portal The Writers' Hub; see http://www.writershub.co.uk/features-piece.php?pc=2109
Wilderness and the Future City
05th, May 2013From the land of lions to the Lion City (all will be illuminated)… wilderness and the future were the perhaps unsurprising themes in a recent working trip to Singapore.
The Skeleton Coast
19th, Apr 2013I have just returned from my third visit to Namibia. What keeps drawing me back to this desert country to the north of South Africa, where I currently live?
Horn of Africa
12th, Mar 2013Cape Town’s Design Indaba (a Zulu word meaning ‘matter for discussion’) is an annual exhibition of the best of design, arts and crafts of southern Africa.