Sunday Times Literary Awards Interviews: Feinstein, Harber, Wiener, Lewin, Steinberg, Golakai and Heyns
LitNet’s Bibi Slippers interviewed the shortlistees for the Sunday Times Fiction Award and Alan Paton Award about their nominated books. Last week we brought you her interviews with Henrietta Rose-Innes, Adam Schwartzman and McIntosh Polela, as well as her Q&A with Yewande Omotoso.
This week, Alan Paton Award shortlistees Andrew Feinstein (The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade), Anton Harber (Diepsloot), Mandy Wiener (Killing Kebble: An Underworld Exposed), Hugh Lewin (Stones Against the Mirror: Friendship in the Time of the South African Struggle) and Jonny Steinberg (Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York) are interviewed by Slippers.
She also talks to HJ Golakai (The Lazarus Effect) and Michiel Heyns (Lost Ground), who are both on the Sunday Times Fiction Prize shortlist.
The winners of the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and Alan Paton Award will be announced at a ceremony in Johannesburg on 21 June.
If you were to name your main reasons for writing this specific book, what would they be?
To expose the global arms trade for what it is: collusion between governments, their intelligence agencies, large arms companies and arms dealers of dubious repute. To reveal how the trade – operating in something of a parallel legal universe – makes the world a less democratic place, a more corrupt place, a poorer place and a more dangerous place.
If you were to name your main reasons for writing this specific book, what would they be?
Because I love doing journalism, real shoe-leather reporting, going to places I might not normally go to and talking to people I might not normally meet. Because I wanted to tell untold stories that are central to our country and our lives, but are neglected. Because we need to know.
If you were to name your main reasons for writing this specific book, what would they be?
My primary reason for writing Killing Kebble was to record events for posterity, to serve history and to create order out of chaos by concisely telling one of the most complex and convoluted stories in our country’s recent history. The Kebble murder was one of the most defining events in South Africa’s post-democratic era and the subsequent chain of events impacted greatly on the path the country would follow. For me, it was important that the reading public understood the significance of the story and the way it affected their lives.
If you were to name your main reasons for writing this specific book, what would they be?
My first book, Bandiet, was published in 1975. That was about prison, a recording of the physical realities of my seven years in jail. Of course it was a personal book, but I wrote it very quickly. The act of writing was another kind of release.
But writing Stones Against the Mirror was completely different. I found that I was tracking a special journey, a journey of reconciliation, between me and the friend who, many years ago, betrayed me and others in the protest sabotage group that we belonged to.
If you were to name your main reasons for writing this specific book, what would they be?
To see if I was able to bring a non-South African world alive on the page.
Could you describe how you came to write this story? Did the story find you or did you seek it out?
It was very much a case of my going out to find it. In fact, I relocated to another continent for two years to write it.
If you were to name your main reasons for writing this specific book, what would they be?
To keep my brain from trying to be my friend by talking to me all the time.
To not die an obscure, “normal” person; to have my name remembered beyond my circle of my relatives and friends.
To be my own boss on a project for once.
To get over my chronic bout of shadow (read: middle) child syndrome, make my parents proud, and put Liberia on the map again.
To make money to pay for adventurous trips and glorious food,
To say “Ha!” to everyone who said short girls with A-cups always finish last.
If there were to be a large-scale film adaptation of your book, who would you cast as your main character, and why?
I would cast Brad Pitt, because I’ve always wanted to meet him, but in fact he’d be entirely unsuitable. So someone more inward and reflective – Ralph Fiennes? Or Daniel Craig, before he became James Bond.
Was there anything you found particularly difficult in writing your book?
The ending – whether to end on a bang or a whimper. (I settled for both.)
Book details
- The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade by Andrew Feinstein
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EAN: 9781868423323
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- Diepsloot by Anton Harber
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EAN: 9781868424214
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- Killing Kebble: An Underworld Exposed by Mandy Wiener
EAN: 9781770102453
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- Stones Against the Mirror: Friendship in the time of the South African struggle by Hugh Lewin
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EAN: 9781415201480
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- Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York by Jonny Steinberg
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EAN: 9781868423828
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- The Lazarus Effect by H J Golakai
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EAN: 9780795703195
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- Lost Ground by Michiel Heyns
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EAN: 9781868424160
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Apr
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