The third day of the 2015 Open Book Festival is about to begin! Here is one of the highlights from yesterday’s action:
Erin Devenish covered “Sowing the Seeds”, in which Patrick Gale, Jacqui L’Ange and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor talked about researching place and time with Nancy Richards.
In the session, Richards facilitated a conversation about how the three authors situated their novels in time and space, and how they go about doing research to make the stories authentic. Owuor and L’Ange spoke about their debut novels, Dust and The Seed Thief respectively, and Gale, who was the panel’s veteran, spoke about his most recent novel: A Place Called Winter.
To begin the conversation, Richards asked the authors to speak about the location and period of their novels, and why they chose those specific places and times.
Owuor says that her story spans 50 years of time, and at times dips even further into the past in order to better understand the present. The novel is, she says, very much situated in Kenya. She says that living in Kenya, she became aware of the discrepancy between the way things really were and the way government represents things. She believed that the country would detonate if the great silence were not broken.
Gale’s A Place Called Winter is a fictionalisation of his great grandfather, who deserted his family to move to Canada. This is his first work of historical fiction, and he says it was “a story that would not be denied”. To research this book, he spent a small fortune on second-hand books about Canada at the turn of the century. He also visited the country, and consulted some friends who know their history very well. His most important source and inspiration, though, was the correspondence between his grandmother and her mother. He discovered the letters in an old chest of his mother’s, and described it as “a writer’s dream”.
L’ange felt compelled to write a story about the connection between Africa and Brazil as she has experienced it. So, the location of her novel was already decided, she just needed to find the right story and the right time period to express what she needed to say. Speaking about the way the reading, archive work and general research she did, L’ange commented that “every book has its own library”. Deciding what to include and what to leave out was a challenge, but she is comforted by the idea that the ghosts of the darlings you cut remain in the completed work
The conversation wrapped up with a question from Perfect Hlongwane, who expressed his suspicion of official versions of events, and asked how the authors on stage deal with such accounts in their research. Owuor said nothing gives her greater pleasure than getting around the misinformation in her fiction.
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The festival will be covered by Books LIVE editor Jennifer Malec (@projectjennifer), deputy editor Helené Prinsloo (@helenayp), assistant editors Erin Devenish (@ErinDevenish811), Annetjie van Wynegaard (@Annetjievw) and Jennifer Platt (@Jenniferdplatt) of the Sunday Times.
Keep an eye on our Facebook page (Facebook.com/BooksLIVESA) and our Twitter profile (@BooksLIVESA) for more information and pictures!
Book details
- A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale
EAN: 9781472205308
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- Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
EAN: 9781783781317
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- The Seed Thief by Jacqui L’Ange
Book homepage
EAN: 9781415207567
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