I have just made my debut in the U.S. with my novel Fathers and Fugitives, a book that garnered praise and won prizes in South Africa, but has, until recently, been unknown to readers in America, as am I as a writer. Unless you live in the English-speaking world, and unless your book is written in English, you initially have a relatively small potential readership. There are some exceptions; Chinese and Spanish books certainly have a large audience, for instance. But when you write in the Global South, and in a small language like Afrikaans, as I do, then you have to first achieve success in your country of origin—and then hope that international agents and publishers will notice you and take a chance on your work. And that it will then find a wider audience. It is the case with many authors that they may only ever find success within their own country and cultural sphere, and that’s fine too. But it is in the DNA of most writers to want to be read as widely as possible.
In my own case, ironically, I used to live in New York and London, the two centers of publishing in the modern era. But back then, my life was lived in an entirely different sphere. I was trapped in the world of corporate law, working first in a New York law firm, and then in a U.S. multinational company. In 2010, I left my job and London behind and returned to the country of my birth to write. Leaving a lucrative job in the world of international lawyering with a plan to start a literary career in South Africa is not what most people would recommend. Somehow I’ve made it work. Apart from being widely reviewed and read in Afrikaans, my books have also appeared in some continental European languages. Some were published in English in the U.K. previously, by small U.K. independent publishers. It is only now, though, that the more established Europa Editions, an outstanding publisher of translated fiction, has taken on the book both in the U.S. and U.K. and with real enthusiasm.
This has been an interesting journey, detouring via law and a professional life in New York and London, and then back to my home country and writing in my mother tongue, a small language spoken only at the southern edge of the world. On top of that, it is a language with a complex history—it was, for a long time, associated with Apartheid, even though the majority of its speakers are in fact Black, and it had its origin in the mouths of slaves who were emulating their masters’ Dutch. It was then hijacked by the Apartheid architects, who tried to erase this history and refashion it as a white language. So, I started my second career—writing fiction—in this marginal language, in a small southern outpost of the world with a difficult and complex history, and then my writing slowly started traveling northwards from there. Particularly for someone who used to work as a cross-border mergers and acquisitions attorney in New York City, this is an unusual journey. Perhaps I can now think of myself as a cross-border author.
The story of Fathers and Fugitives, to some degree, mirrors this back and forth between north and south. My protagonist, Daniel, is a South African journalist living in London. His father’s will compels him to visit a long-lost cousin on the old family farm in the Free State, deep in the South African hinterland. Daniel and his cousin then travel with a seriously ill boy to Japan for an experimental cure, on a voyage that will change their lives. The cousins ultimately return to South Africa. And go to the U.K. again. And then Daniel returns to South Africa once more. I wanted to take Daniel out of the cosmopolitan life he has established in a first-world urban world and destabilize the precarious balance between home and non-home that he had established. I wanted, in effect, to “reparochialise” him, embed him in a remote South African landscape. And then see how that works out for him.