"I don’t like linearity – I find it boring." Nick Wood interviews Tade Thompson.

February 8, 2017 Guest User

"I have known Tade Thompson for some years now and we co-wrote ‘The Last Pantheon’ in AfroSF 2 (December 2015). Our collaboration on that novella was exciting and often surprising, working with whatever the other threw up into the air – or onto the paper. I prefer face-to-face contact as it feels more alive and spontaneous. In keeping with this, we thus met for the interview in front of the British Library in Bloomsbury, London." - Nick Wood

NICK: Going back to the beginning, when and why did you start writing?

TADE: Ever since I picked up a pencil. I wasn’t interested in reading when I was a child. I saw a Fantastic Four comic and asked my mother to read it to me. She said I had to learn to read. So I learned to read, but then I started drawing my own comics, telling original stories. My teacher in primary school used to give us large, blank sheets of paper. She would draw a line across the middle and ask us to draw a picture on the top and write a story below. That just set me off.

I used to draw 3-4 comics a week on pink and green typing sheets and make carbon copies I could sell to my mates. I did this throughout primary and secondary school, with my biggest piece being a James Bond, DR. NO comic adaptation.

I wrote one novel when I was 15, a spy novel which was essentially a James Bond/The Saint pastiche. I had one copy and a guy called Mark borrowed and never returned it.

In university around 1995 I wrote a short story called 'The Sneeze', for the college magazine.

From 1999 I started writing regularly on a PC and around 2000 wrote the obligatory first ‘trunked’ novel, around 150K in length. I learnt a lot from this and from 2001 my aim was to be published. My first sale was in 2002/2003 to a small zine for a contributor’s copy or token per-word payment then in 2004/2005, my first semi-pro sale to Ideomancer, ‘The McMahon Institute for Unquiet Minds’.

NICK: And WHY do you write?

TADE: I have a lot to say. Writing teaches you different ways of thinking and expressing things. I once quit writing fiction for a year, and I filled volumes and volumes of journals. It’s just a thing that is in me.

NICK: For people who don't know you or your work, how would you characterize both yourself and what you write?

TADE: I’m a complicated man. I have a lot of rage at the portrayal of my people. Often, when I encounter Africans in narrative I see red. I have no patience with ignorant portrayals and do not spare misrepresentations.

Miles Davis had a term for some other black musicians, such as Louis Armstrong: ‘Smilers’. Always smiling, in order to be ‘the non-threatening Negro’, to avoid being described as the ‘angry black man’. I can understand why this was done, but it’s not me. I’ll say and write whatever I want.

I’ve studied science and history and it is important to have an accurate portrayal of things that are not well known, for example that there were rebellions during colonial times, and that the role of women was a lot bigger than is generally known (e.g. Maria Nkoje). There is so much ignorance, which is why it is important to keep repeating honest and accurate portrayals, to try and create public consciousness.

I guess I write to entertain, if anyone is entertained by what I write.

NICK: You've clearly read very widely and well beyond genre, so why SF in particular?

TADE: I love SF because you can bend reality and change history.

I enjoy speculative fiction in its broadest sense – weird, fantasy, hard SF etc. I love the freedom in changing history and facts to suit the narrative. Like thought experiments you’re unable to run in mimetic fiction. Anything can happen – and that makes it so interesting.

NICK: Have you - or do you - write outside genre - if so, how would you characterize this?

TADE: I write anything, both fiction and non-fiction. I have written crime and memoir, and I am writing general fiction, but nothing I want to share yet. This is because I read everything except perhaps romance or cod-Medieval high fantasy. I did read over a hundred Mills and Boon novels in my teenage years, so I think I’ve sampled the genre enough.

NICK: You've published a couple of books as well as several novellas and a good clutch of short stories - where would you suggest a reader NEW to your work begin?

TADE: Rosewater – I’m satisfied with this, as well as ‘The Apologists’ in Interzone #266 for short fiction. My other novel Making Wolf, although you should have a strong stomach for that one. My novella The Murders of Molly Southbourne is due out from TOR in October 2017.

NICK: Your first novel Making Wolf won a Golden Tentacle Kitschie Award (for Best Debut Novel) and is an exciting genre-bending crime noir, but is sadly looking for a new home. Any advice you'd give others off the back of this difficult experience?

TADE: It’s not looking for a new home. I’m working with Lola Shoneyin (who runs Ake Festival, and wrote The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives) on a Nigerian edition. I’m not yet looking around for other publishers. My advice? Always do your due diligence. Speak to people who’ve published with the press you’re exploring – preferably by phone if possible.

People are often afraid to talk if hooked up with problem presses, in case it impacts negatively on their career. If you can’t sell something, keep it in the trunk – and at some point, when you sell something else, someone will ask, ‘what else you got?’

NICK: Rosewater - your latest novel with Apex, is a complex and brilliantly original alien invasion story - what was the spark and fuel for this story?

TADE: My interest in alien invasion scenarios. So many invasions are thinly disguised colonial metaphors. These are less interesting for me – a repeating fetish of dominating so-called lesser cultures, as if rehashing generational memory.

Why would they come all the way to Earth? What might their motivation be, to embark on generational ships on the off-chance of stumbling upon Earth? True aliens would surely be unknowable.

NICK: Like in some of the work of The Strugatsky Brothers?

TADE: Yes, perhaps a bit of that – leaving their enigmatic rubbish, as in ‘Roadside Picnic’. I enjoyed their work.

NICK: Rosewater is set in Nigeria, which was formerly a British colony - can you tell us if there is an association between the new invaders Wormwood and the old British colonialists?

TADE: My book might be a metaphor for neo-colonialism, a colonization of the mind. That’s just my reading of my own work, though.

If you watch music videos in Nigeria, many of them are mimetic, using the semiotics of American rap. So that’s odd, watching gang signs from LA being used out of context. “Sound and fury, signifying nothing,” as the Bard said. Or, maybe it signifies minds colonised, as per the distribution of resources and aspirations involved.

NICK: Your novel structure is unusual and intriguing, alternating between a younger and older Kaaro - and not always in an obvious sequence - what drove this structural choice for you?

TADE: That’s how people tell stories, it’s not perfectly sequential. They jump backwards and forwards, so this is a way of mimicking normal tale telling according to director Alejandro González Iñárritu.

With rewriting I had to wrestle with this structure, part of me supporting the link between art and chaos. But in the end I opted for an alternating structure of past and present perspectives, with Missions slotted in-between acting as linking narratives between young Kaaro and older Kaaro.

I don’t like linearity – I find it boring. I can avoid writer’s block by jumping around and then piecing the parts together.

It’s also a way of keeping the reader engaged. If you can’t predict what’s coming next, you keep turning the page. The problem with working like this, though, is that I have to know exactly where and when everything happens and to whom. The real nightmare was keeping track of the stuff that happens off-camera since the novel is written in first person.

NICK: America goes 'Dark' in Rosewater - I do hope you have plans to enlighten us as to what is happening there - AND how it gets resolved?

TADE: Yes, some people have drawn parallels with Trump in the US. The Americans have run all the scenarios and realise there’s no way to beat Wormwood, and so have initiated the ‘Drawbridge Protocol’ which is extreme isolation from the rest of the world.

NICK: Rosewater has been garnering many great reviews and I'm hoping will feature on awards shortlists significantly - but what next (or right now!) for you, Tade?

TADE: The next book in the series goes further into the experiences of the aliens in Nigeria, focusing more on Aminat. I’m enjoying writing it; it's tentatively called Rosewater: City State.

We find out what happened to America in the third book, Humans of Rosewater.

NICK: So it’s a trilogy?

TADE: Gah! I don’t like trilogies, but I guess it is. Sort of. Maybe a quadrology, because there’s a novella between book two and book three. Ideally it’s one big book (and I hope there will be an omnibus edition one day). Lord of the Rings was originally one book, but was seen as too unwieldy on its own.

I keep my options open – although I know the entire narrative through to the end, what happens to Earth, America, humanity, the aliens…

It’s very real in my head and I have it in files, in my notebooks and with flowcharts providing rough signposts. That way, I keep my characters and dialogue open and free, plotting more closely when I review what I’ve written. All the elements in the book have a function – they’re not there just for spectacle or decoration. My ‘reanimates’ are not just zombies but are in evolution and have a purpose, particularly in Book 2.

NICK: As a founding member of African SF Society, how would you characterize African SF? And how much does your own work dovetail with this - or not?

TADE: African SF is primordial – there’s no obvious pattern, it’s huge and diverse. There’s probably more magic than technology overall, more speculative fiction than hard SF (I hate that label). We’re getting some extrapolation of Hollywood films, some mimesis of Western SF tropes.

Kojo Laing’s ‘Woman of The Aeroplanes’ on the other hand is a brilliant evocation of a town in Ghana perhaps quantum entangled with a town in Scotland. Its strength lies in its poetic language and ability to pass the stage of Western mimesis. This is what we need to focus on – what are OUR narratives; how can we tell OUR stories, using and pushing the tropes of SF further.

Nnedi Okorafor in the US and Lauren Beukes from South Africa are the two obvious writers most people think of when considering African SF. We need to write more of our own experiences. We need more writers from Lilongwe and elsewhere in the continent.

I write from London of a remembered Africa. I’m not speaking for anybody in Africa. I write beyond Africa as well.

NICK: What are some of the African SF books you have particularly enjoyed?

TADE: There’s a lot to like. I’ve enjoyed your Azanian Bridges, as it’s clearly emerged from the soil of South Africa -- and I’m not saying that just because you’re interviewing me.

Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria is a masterpiece EVERYONE should read. The richness and beauty of its language and its uncompromising vision is so powerful it should be read several times! It’s very good indeed.

Chikodili Emulumadu’s Candy Girl is a weird and absurdist story, growing from local African space.

Part 2 of Nick Wood's fascinating interview with Tade Thompson can be found here

Tade Thompson lives and works in the UK. He is the author of a number of SFF, crime, general fiction, and memoir pieces. His alternate history crime novel Making Wolf from Rosarium Publishing was released in September 2015 and his latest novel is Rosewater. More of Tade's thoughts and writing can be found at his blog, Long Time After Midnight.

Nick Wood is a Zambian born, South African naturalised clinical psychologist, with over a dozen short stories previously published in Interzone, Subterfuge, Infinity Plus, and PostScripts, amongst others. Nick has also appeared in the first African anthology of science fiction, AfroSF – and now in a collaborative novella follow-up with Tade Thompson in AfroSFv2.

His book, Azanian Bridges, explores a current but alternative South Africa, where apartheid survived. Nick has completed an MA in Creative Writing (SF & Fantasy) through Middlesex University, London and is currently training clinical psychologists and counsellors at the University of East London in England. He can be found on Twitter, @nick45wood or on his blog.

'You get to write things the way they should be, not as they are.' An Interview with Frank Owen.

August 10, 2016 Guest User

In a couple of moments, you'll be on to us. We asked both the authors that make up Frank Owen the same questions, to get a Human League, he-said, she-said effect. Neither of them was allowed to look at the other one’s answers. The results were funny, revealing and inspiring. Here's the second part of our interview of the two-headed writer - Frank Owen.

How did the decision to write a novel together come about?

DIANE: Alex begged and begged. No, seriously: We shared a publisher, Umuzi, and did the launch of his first novel The Space Race together. It was fun, so we thought we’d have a go at doing a bit of writing where people actually buy your book and it isn’t just a nice hobby for high days and holidays.

Who the fuck is Frank Owen? Tell us him as if he were a character in a novel.

DIANE: It turns out that Frank Owen is a real person, unfortunately for our Twitter handle – two real people, in fact: a journalist and a country-and-western singer. It might get a little awkward.

Our Frank is just a guy trying to get his head around the post-apocalyptic universe that is the world right now, and has been for some time. The future is now.

Frank Owen's prose style is cohesive, although your individual writing styles are quite different. Talk a bit about the process of writing together please?

DIANE: We outline the story (timeline; diagrams) and allocate characters, and Alex does a first draft of each chapter, usually just under a thousand words. Then I go in and take out all the giraffes and nuclear submarines, and put in some songs. Alex does all the lactation and menstruation bits.

South is set in an intriguing alternate history to America. The North and South remain divided, with the North separating itself from the South, much like the USA separates itself from Mexico. What inspired the setting?

DIANE: Or like the apartheid government allocated homelands in one country – or like any government internship programme using reserves. Segregation never works (unless you count single-sex high schools). We’ve overlaid a lot of American events with a not-entirely-fictional South African framework. Some of the early readers liked the idea of the ghost camps in South, where people that the rest of the country has rejected have gathered to find a workable alternative.

The science of South is real: the mushrooms; the environmental warfare; the holistic medicine; the politicking. But so is the courage and the perseverance of the ordinary people in it, we hope. We’re in dire need of that kind of leadership right now.

Both historical and fantasy novels require intense levels of research as world building plays an integral part in the suspension of a reader's disbelief. You've created a mash-up with South: part cowboy flick, part apocalypse fable, and then given yourself the added task of writing an alternate history for a country that isn't your home. No easy task. Let's talk about research: how much? what kind? where? how?

DIANE: We’re not reinventing the wheel here: Human fear, desperation, hunger and triumph are universal, and that stuff is at the heart of any right-thinking novel. We’ve obviously been in the country briefly; we know how to use Google Earth; we use expert beta readers who tell us things like, A severed femoral artery can’t be staunched with a heated frying pan’ or ‘Mesquite would never grow on that ridge.’ That’s the beauty of speculative fiction – or any sort of fiction. You get to write things the way they should be, not as they are. This is why novels are so important, so radical: You have the chance to change the status quo. The setting is only the beginning.

And then you sell it internationally. Are you afraid of your American audience?

DIANE: I’m afraid of stereotypes of all stripes.

We heard you listened to quite a lot of country music while writing South. Did you discover any bands you think we should all be listening to?

DIANE: I’m a total noob, and I’m not ashamed of that. I seriously got into The Civil Wars while I was writing. But then I wanted some South African stuff, and I tried to remember all the folk and rock that changed me when I was much younger, and so I started digging up all the greats again, all the enlightened angels: The LED, Squeal, Boo!, Johannes Kerkorrel, Koos Kombuis, Valiant Swart. It made me remember how Afrikaans was reclaimed in the early nineties as a language of longing and redemption after segregation – what an act of courage that must have been, from these white okes who’d been sent to the army.

And of course we were lucky enough to inveigle the fantastic Gene Kierman from Miss Texas 1977 into composing some tracks for us. They're downloadable here: http://southvsnorth.com/. The band’s first album is on https://misstexas1977.bandcamp.com. The track ‘Nettles’ gives me all the feelings. The backing vocals!

Serious question. South African writers are looking for readers in other markets, choosing to write stories that have little connection to South Africa or the current South African narrative. If we're being totally honest, we're talking white South Africans. Do you think there is no home market for white writers anymore?

DIANE: All stories are fundamentally connected, or else why bother with empathy? A change in setting can be a way to find out how you really feel about the big ideas, but the end point of any fiction is the same: to expand the experience of the reader. There’s a lot of research around at the moment that supports the idea that an intense reading experience evokes the same neural activity as actually experiencing the event. This is fucking terrifying as well as exciting, and it’s one of the ways we can talk to one another without spewing racial invective (Rage: satisfying in the moment, but not in the longer term). We can only try to understand.

I think that everything matters in the present, even if we maintain that we are products of our terrible, funny, sad, broken backgrounds. I say this as a person with a doctorate in the field: South Africa is post-traumatic. Every interaction, every conversation takes us immediately into the past, the same way a rape survivor can be continually thrown back into re-experiencing the horror. But we must face it in our private and public lives, face it and resolve it, because we have to live with ourselves. The government is not going to do it for us, although the TRC did try. That’s what South is about, too – historical debt and responsibility: male and female; black and white; love and mercy.

If I was a literary tourist and you were my guide, where would you direct me to find the best writing in South Africa right now?

DIANE: Genna Gardini, T.O. Molefe, Thando Mgqolozana, William Dicey, Kagiso Lesego Molope, Sean O’Toole and Nick Mulgrew

On Diane's Bedside Table

William Dicey’s Poor Dizzy Spooks, one of the essays in his collection, Mongrel, Steven Robins' Letters of Stone and Jolyn Phillips’ Tjieng Tjang Tjerries.

Diane Awerbuck wrote Gardening at Night, which was awarded the Commonwealth Best First Book Award (Africa and the Caribbean). Her work has been translated into Mandarin, German, French, Russian and Swedish. Awerbuck’s short stories are collected in Cabin Fever and from it the story ‘Phosphorescence’ was shortlisted for the 2014 Caine Prize. Another ‘Leatherman’ won the 2015 Short Story Day Africa Prize. Awerbuck’s latest novel is Home Remedies. More of her, in the form of poetry and interviews are at http://aerodrome.co.za/tag/diane-awerbuck/.

See Frank Owen at Kalk Bay Books on the 11th of August or at The Book Lounge on 17th August for the launch of South. Claire Robertson will be in conversation with Frank. If you want come along only because you're a fan of Claire Robertson, that's okay too.

Interview by Rachel Zadok a.k.a @rachelzadok

'...America almost feels to me like a genre in itself.' An Interview with Frank Owen.

August 10, 2016 Guest User

Rivalry is rife in writing. Famous battles have included Ernest Hemingway vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gabriel Garcia Marquez vs. Mario Vargas Llosa and Charlotte Brontë vs. Jane Austen. So were interested to find out how two great writers, Diane Awerbuck and Alex Latimer succeeded in writing South, such a fine novel, without so much as a punch or broken nib. Here's the first part of our interview of the two-headed writer - Frank Owen.

How did the decision to write a novel together come about?

ALEX: Writing my first novel was really difficult – mostly because it was such an isolating experience. I spent a year in my own head. I wanted to find a way of making the process of writing my second novel more fun and more interactive and so when I met Diane through my book launch, this co-writing idea came up. We co-wrote a short story for FunDza as a trial run, to see if it could work – and then we began on South.

So who the fuck is Frank Owen? Tell us as if he were a character in a novel.

ALEX: Frank Owen used to work at the Post Office. He’s almost sixty now. He used to see lots of people everyday. He saw them licking stamps and sending their virus-laden saliva across the country, mostly to distant loved ones. It got him thinking about viruses in America and he began researching how long contagions could live between a stamp and an envelope. That was the kernel that sparked South. Frank’s biggest secret is that he was born in Canada.

Frank Owen's prose style is cohesive, although your individual writing styles are quite different. Talk a bit about the process of writing together please?

ALEX: The key for us is to understand our roles. I’m the plot guy and Diane is the style and voice guy. Of course there’s always cross-over, but it’s helpful to know who’s in charge of what. I’d occasionally tell Diane that some action in the book absolutely needed to happen and when she wanted to know why, I couldn’t say exactly. There’s a lot of trust involved.

ALEX: South, and the follow-up novel – North, deal with the idea of segregation in society. With segregation being the first step toward depersonalising brutality. As South Africans born during Apartheid we’re obviously not unfamiliar with the realities of that. Setting the story in America sheds a different light on the topic. An interesting light, I hope.

ALEX: Diane and I spoke about this a lot. There was a sense of fraudulence about writing a book set in a place neither of us had spent any meaningful time in. But weirdly, when we started writing South, America didn’t feel like a foreign setting. As a white South African, I grew up on a relentless diet of American culture through film, literature and marketing – so much so that America almost feels to me like a genre in itself. I probably know America better than I know South Africa in some senses. So with that intense cultural colonisation, a bit of Google Earth (Street View is amazing) and some intense internetting – the whole thing came together.

And then you sell it internationally. Are you afraid of your American audience?

ALEX: Not afraid. Intrigued by what their response will be. The world of South is deliberately different from real America.

Did you watch cowboy movies as a child? If yes, what were your favourites?

ALEX: I came late to cowboy movies – but I certainly watched a few classics while writing South - Once Upon a Time in the West, The Searchers. But I also discovered Reel Injun, a documentary about how Native Americans were and still are portrayed in cowboy films – and the devastating effects of that portrayal. It’s the other side of the cowboy story. If cowboy films are North, then Reel Injun is South.

ALEX: I’m not sure there’s been much of a market in South Africa for a while. When I first started meeting local writers I asked each of them the same question, “Why do you do it?” Because I know it’s not about the money – there’s hardly any. And there’s not a whole heap of fame going around either. My basic conclusion was that most local writers suffer from a compulsion to write. Setting the odd novel overseas in order to support their habit is not a sin and it’s not unpatriotic. It’s simply a means for writers to keep writing.

If I was a literary tourist and you were my guide, where would you direct me to find the best writing in South Africa right now?

ALEX: Claire Robertson, Kgebetli Moele, Ivan Vladislavic

On Alex's Bedside Table

The Shining and White Fang. And Ramona the Pest which I've been reading to my daughter.

Alex Latimer writes and illustrates children’s picture books, which have been published and translated around the world. His third book, Lion vs Rabbit won the Hampshire Picture Book Award and was nominated for the Kate Greenaway Medal. In 2013 he published his debut novel, The Space Race. Lauren Beukes called it ‘witty with twisted charm and a whole lot of action.’ Last year, Alex wrote the prize-winning short story ‘A Fierce Symmetry’ for the continent-wide competition run by Short Story Day Africa in 2016. Find him at http://www.alexlatimer.co.za.

See Frank Owen at Kalk Bay Books on the 11th of August or at The Book Lounge on 17th August for the launch of South. Claire Robertson will be in conversation with Frank. If you want come along only because you're a fan of Claire Robertson, that's okay too.

Interview by Rachel Zadok a.k.a @rachelzadok

'What keeps me coming back mostly is the scrutiny.' #WriterPrompt Winner: A mini-interview with Gabriel G Odigiri.

August 4, 2016 Guest User

I was in a fiery lit room. Between sturdily latched elevated steel doors and a heavily smoked inland.

I stomped over a pavement. Red patches on the floor. The lower lane was covered with hibernated debris and the ridges were whitewashed like a faded blue blouse.

I was taunted by the flickering red lights and the strong smell of sulphur and nitrous oxide in the room.

I was quite drowsy and faltered into the shades of the deeming frame of the inner square room.

I heard indistinct howling from the inner square room that stretched to the main room. I presumed, it was the blizzard approaching from north to our inland.

For a moment I thought of Mount Rio. At the death of winter and the eve of summer. A breath of departed cold wind. Waxing sun. Autumn birds tormenting the eaves of our house. The healing power of the matutinal moon.

A rising flame pulled me into the frame. Where the howling sounded more like a ghost's whisper in the wind.

I nudged myself back up, after I flopped on the concrete floor hailing to the sound of distant footfalls.

I swirled right. Managed to balance my weight on the twirl. Managed to hide away from burgeoning shadows. Where surreally, broken bricks reels beneath from where I stood.

I was in a fiery lit room, when a thousand old shackles broke. Never did I imagine, I walked miles at the dead of the sun on a deserted bridge. I was yet to cross.

Gab is one of the most regular participants of #WriterPrompt and we've enjoyed seeing his writing evolve and his unique literary visions.

You have been one of the most committed members of #WriterPrompt. What keeps you coming back?

GAB: #WriterPrompt, is a platform that gives young aspiring African writers the opportunity to showcase their talent and hone their writing skills, that is certain. For me, it gives me the opportunity to meet young African writers like myself. Get to see their style of writing and learn from them. Also, to see if indeed I suffice as a writer. What keeps me coming back mostly is the scrutiny. I learn every time I post 200 word flash fiction on the platform.

What are some of your writing goals?

GAB: Writing is a thing I have come to love so much. And seem to be a bit good at. I have always loved stories and always wanted to tell my stories. I had a mystical childhood. I love to write about my childhood. I am a victim of bullying. I always expressed my pain through writing. As you know, I am fascinated by Post-Apocalyptic stories. I wonder how it would be in Africa. I aim to write stories about the past dictatorial Nigerian regime, the insurgency in Northeastern Nigeria, Niger Delta militancy etc. In a long run, I aim to delve into screenwriting, into a genre, most writers in this part of the world shy away from.

What are you currently reading?

GAB: I am currently reading Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.

Gab G Odigiri is a young Nigerian writer and Philosophy graduate from Niger Delta University. He was exposed to works by Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Okara, Ben Okri, Elechi Amadi, Camera Laye, Ken Saro-Wiwa from an early age because of his late father’s love for African literature. Gab is very fascinated by the works of Dan Brown and H.P. Lovecraft. He cites his influences in African literature as Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Helon Habila. Gab lives with his hard-working mother in Nigeria’s capital and hopes to become a well-known writer one day. He has several unpublished pieces of short fiction.

"I write fiction of the fantastical." An Interview with Cat Hellisen.

February 2, 2016 Rachel Zadok

Cat Hellisen won the 2015 Short Story Day Africa Prize with her story, "The Worme Bridge". Her latest novel, Beastkeeper, a fairy tale for the loveless, has received high praise in the mainstream media and on the blogosphere, and has just been released in paperback.

Rachel: Congratulations on winning the 2015 Short Story Day Africa Prize. Mary Watson, Billy Kahora and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, our judging panel, were unanimous in selecting “The Worme Bridge” as the winner.

All three are well-respected literary-writers who have shortlisted or won The Caine Prize for African Writing. You yourself received a letter from last year’s Caine Prize chair commending your story, "Mouse Teeth", published in Terra Incognita. It was also praised in a review of the anthology in the L.A. Review of Books. You’re basically getting big kudos from the so-called “literary" community. Do you think the barriers between genre fiction and literary fiction are breaking down? Should these categories even exist or are they harming literature, and by literature I mean all writing, irrespective of category?

CAT: Thank you! As you know, when you're a writer you cling to these moments where people say nice things about your art because a lot of the time it can feel like screaming into the void, so hearing that the decision was unanimous gave me extra incentive to put down the gin & arsenic bespoke cocktail (I call it Writer's Tears, and it tastes like suffering through bad acting) and pick up the old fountain pen and parchment. (Actually, it made me open up a new document on my laptop but writers are professional liars for a reason.)

On to the "literary" debate. I come from a solid genre background, both as a reader and a writer. And sometimes writers like me feel that other writers, and some readers, assume that genre is lesser, stupider and whatever other ers you care to think of. It's reductive and insular, and cuts readers off from a wealth of amazing fiction lurking on those SFF and Horror shelves in their local bookstore, and it denies writers a potential audience.

I write stories of the fantastical. That's my jam, baby. It's what makes me happy. If people decide my work has literary value, that's all well and good, but in the end, I write stories. I make shit up. That's what I do. I like weird things, I like the bones and blood of fantasy - dragons and vampires and ghosts and elves and other worlds and journeys to the stars. I'm never going to stop writing about those things in order to chase down the readers and writers who will only take me seriously if I write about the things they deem "proper writing."

And that's good. Writers writing what makes them happy allows for the artificial and manufactured boundaries of "literary" and fantasy to be blurred. Our first stories were about gods and monsters and heroes. We will always go back to them.

Tiah: So is it really that much of a stretch to say, "I'm a writer of literary speculative fiction"? What is keeping you from owning it? Imposter syndrome? A stance on what makes fiction literary?

CAT: Eh. Not imposter syndrome at all. I know what I write. I know what I love. My work is neither mainstream genre, nor LitSpec (or whatever made-up name we'll use today.) On both sides of the Fantasy/Literary divide there are readers who believe (or want to believe) that all fantasy is Elves and Farm Boy Heroes and Evil Dragons and Dark Lords, and certainly, if you come to my work looking for those things you will find them, just perhaps not in the way you want or expect. That's what I mean by saying I'm neither one nor the other.

If you go look at what is happening in the small SpecFic presses like Small Beer or Chizine or Apex, you'll get a much better idea of where I might fit in one day. My favourite books tend to come from these smaller presses, mainly because the current trend in Fantasy at the big presses seems to be strongly Grimdark and epic-heavy and seven-million-in-a-series books, and I'm just not overly interested. I'm far more invested in the stories that fall between cracks because they're the wrong shape—writers like Kathe Koja, Beth Bernobich, Karen Lord, Kelly Link, Greer Gilman, Kari Sperring, Claude Lalumiere... and so on. Sadly, you don't see much of their work in South African book stores.

When forced to pigeonhole myself, I tell people I write fiction of the fantastical.

Tiah: "Serein" the original story you wrote for Water didn't meet SSDA's submission's guidelines for length, so you sold it Shimmer. You then penned "The Worme Bridge" which took the coveted $1000 (R10 000) prize. What was it like trying to write a second entry after you'd already invested so much energy into "Serein"? Did you consider quitting after it fell short of our entry rules? Or are you one of those people with a multitude of stories whirling around in your head?

CAT: "Serein" came about because I find the non-endings of the stories of vanishing people, people who go missing intentionally, so delightfully and horrifyingly fascinating. After I was done, and realised that it was too short for SSDA, I sent it off to Shimmer because that's what you do - never stop submitting stories. I needed something new for SSDA but I wasn't too stressed because water is a pretty open-ended theme and I think it's clear from my fiction that I am obsessed with people who live in the liminal zones of human community. And water is a perfect metaphor for that—it's even in the clichéd phrase, "a fish out of water". Which is essentially what "The Worme Bridge" is about. Once I started playing with that and I had the voice of the character in my head, the initial draft came out very quickly.

Read "The Worme Bridge" on Books Live this Friday.

Detail from the cover of Beastkeeper, paperback edition.

Tiah: You have two self-published novels, Charm and House of Sands and Secrets, the sequel to When the Sea is Rising Red. Later, you serialised Charm on your blog and are now in the process of doing the same with House of Sands and Secrets. What have you taken away from both self-publishing and serialising your work?

CAT: Mostly that if you think it's hard for your book to be noticed in a book store, imagine how much worse it is outside the book store, huddled in the cold with all the other self-published books, and where everyone assumes your work is self-published because you're illiterate and stupid.

Having said that, I believe there are genres where self-pub work does very well—especially erotica and romance, but for SFF, I think the general view of readers is "Well, it must be a load of rubbish if a real publisher didn't want it." Which rather sadly doesn't take into account how narrow mainstream SFF publishing is, and how hard it is to find a place for more niche work.

Serialising is weird. I do it because I can. The books are already finished and edited, and I don't have to deal with the horror of writing and posting without knowing how the story works or ends. I do it as a gift to those readers who have supported me. If you go into it thinking, "Ooh I bet this is how I get noticed by a Big NY editor and get a 12 book deal!" then you're heading down Disappointment Alley into Pointless Rage cul-de-sac.

Tiah: Last year, you challenged yourself to write one story a month. How did that experiment go? What have you taken away from the challenge?

CAT: Oh, well, yes. Hmm.

On one hand, I most definitely failed as I think I ran out of steam somewhere in August last year. On the other, I wrote short fiction, and some of it was even good, and a smaller percentage of that got published by really great magazines or anthologies. I used WATER as one of my monthly prompts and that got me two short stories in one month, both of which sold to excellent venues. So overall we're going with Massive Win on that challenge.

Tiah: You illustrated SSDA's anthology of children's writing, Rapunzel is Dead. Since then, you have dedicated more time to your art – from taking part in InkTober to painting. Have you toyed with the idea of combining your talents? A graphic novel, perhaps?

CAT: I have actually sat down before to start scripting a graphic novel before I realised how much work that would be and how far from ready my artistic talents are. A few doodles here and there are not going to cut it when it comes to an entire graphic novel.

I have one particular novel that I would love to produce as a mixed media art piece—a novel with illustrations, paintings, links to songs, chapters done as sequential art. That would be glorious. But I also have no idea where to begin on a project like that. And of course, the usual fear of being utterly awful.

Rachel: Tell us what’s happening on the ground in your writing community, i.e. Cape Town’s SpecFic scene.

CAT: "Your community" makes it sound like I run it.... I do. I have a throne made out of the skulls of fallen literary writers. Roving packs of SpecFic writers under my command go out to book launches at The Book Lounge, and when our prey is drunk (The Kimberley is a great hunting ground) and vulnerable we lure them into our unmarked van with promises of good reviews, then we eat them alive.

Wait, none of that is true. I promise.

There are loads of writers in Cape Town and Joburg writing speculative fiction of all stripes. The SpecFic community tends to be quite close because we often end up feeling a bit "us against the world" in the South African writing scene, where many publishers close doors to genre and YA fiction. Which is why it's wonderful that anthologies like Short Story Day Africa have embraced us and invited us in. When so often it can feel as though the Welcome Mat is yanked up the moment SA publishing hears the words "fantasy" or "science fiction", making it clear to us that we are welcome is actually a far bigger thing to our community than you may realise.

SA genre writers often go to overseas markets to find their publishing niche, so we work together to beta-read rough work, give editorial feedback, and let others know of new markets or open anthologies. Because of the tendency to head overseas, quite often their names don't get bandied about on the local scene, unfortunately: writers like Nerine Dorman, who has been a stalwart of the Cape Town genre scene, even creating a speculative fiction writer's group that meets once a month (Adamastor Writer's Guild) is one. There are a host of writers slowly making names for themselves: Dave de Burgh, Angela Meadon, and Abigail Godsell spring to mind, but the SpecFic community is vast and writers like Diane Awerbuck, Alex Latimer, and yourself [Rachel Zadok] are also part of it, as far as I see it.

SpecFic is a very wide parasol and we're happy to share our shade with those happy to play on our beach.

We make the best sandcastles though, sorry.

On Cat's Bedside Table

I've been reading a lot of Sherlock fanfic. Especially really filthy ones with Moriarty and Sherlock. Having said that, I've just started Iain S. Thomas's Intentional Dissonance and it's pretty nifty. Sadly lacking in Sherlock but one can't have everything.

Cat Hellisen is a South African-born writer of fantasy for adults and children. Her work includes the novel When the Sea is Rising Red and short stories in Apex, F & SF, Something Wicked, and Tor.com. Her latest novel is a fairy tale for the loveless, Beastkeeper.