Ben Trovato says Byron Loker is a talented writer who will go far if he can stop surfing and chasing women. He was once a film student but is now fully rehabilitated. His debut short story collection, New Swell, has been prescribed in Grade 9 in the Western Cape and Gauteng. Heaven help the poor sods.
Mike Nicol reckons, ‘If there’s a new swell in South African short stories, Byron Loker is on the wave. His stories are different from anything that has been written in English in South Africa – they are fresh, honest, off the wall but simultaneously clear moments of everyday life. They owe much in tone and style to the work of Herman Charles Bosman without being in any way imitative. It is as if the short story tradition, which was interrupted by the dictates of apartheid, has been resumed.’
