Thando Mgqolozana

Thando Mgqolozana (born 27 August 1983, in Cape Town, South Africa) is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar, a recipient of the Golden Key International Honour for Scholastic Achievement, and one of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans of 2010. He has previously worked as a researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council and is now based at the University of Cape Town Quotes My name is Thando Mgqolozana. I am a south African novelist. I like to introduce myself as a novelist first and foremost although there are other things I do. I have three books: “A man is who is not a man”; “Hear me Alone” and “Unimportance”. My last book was in 2014 so I am slacking. But I also do other things. I write screen plays and the most famous one Inxeba (The Wound). I also organise the Abantu book festival in Soweto I don’t do too much preparation because I am interested in finding out. I don’t only sit down when it’s ready and just transcribe. But by the time I sit down, I would have thought of an idea and tried to see whether it can have a life on the page. I explore and when it gets interesting enough at that point I can commit to the page and find out. I try to write fast, so I don’t take years to write a novel.Because there’s something important I am trying to capture. The feeling I have now, I must be able to sustain it. When I abandon a story and come back, it’s hard to zone back to the characters. For ‘ A man is not a man’, it took about three months to write the first draft. But I had been writing other things so I was in the moment but editing and developing took longer. When I write, I need a certain level of seclusion in the beginning because I am trying to focus. But after a while, I can engage the writing anywhere, anytime, sometimes in a restaurant. For the longest time in my writing career, I had a day job so I could only write at 3 am in the morning. The tranquility helps. You are more energised and your brain is fresh. So, you write faster, you are more creative and your mind is unoccupied by other day to day activities. So, writing in the morning initially was a deliberate choice I made.I write mostly in first person prose and I become the eye, I become the characters. I find that It works better for me. I don’t identify with the distancing of the second and third person prose styles. I have been lying to myself thinking that I know a man when I see one. And all those giant men who taught me what it is to be a man are also liars. Either that or you are a liar. You be the judge. There was silence.And just for the record, I won't leave my home in the care of a man who is not a man. 6 I feel that I’m there to perform for an audience that does not treat me as a literary talent, but as an anthropological subject – as though those people are here to confirm their suspicions that somehow I am inferior to them. A book you read when you were a child will read differently when you pick it up later. [What is your writing routine?] Three things: it has to be done in solitude or not done at all. Second, I don’t need an idea before I seat myself in front of a computer—though having one helps. Notions just reveal themselves as I write, plus I already have life to turn to. And third, for me filling up the page with words the first time is typing, the writing follows in the process of reading the first draft. When the book is new and everybody’s reading it, I often re-read to find out what the excitement is all about. I don’t want to miss out, you see. But this euphoria doesn’t last. After a few months I will have discovered so much that could have been done differently, better, the sight of it becomes a reminder that the novel is the poorer version of what I had in mind.The physical book is here to stay. We come from a history where black writers were banned and the stories that would most resonate with a black audience were suppressed. There have never been as many black writers as we have now, there has never been as much diversity in terms of voices and stories. I’ve said a few times already that the only time I will feel at home in the SA literary space is when my publisher, editor, proofreader, graphic designer, layout person, printer, publicist, distributor, bookseller and most readers are black – reading my work in their preferred languages. But I’m not going to wake up tomorrow to a decolonised country, am I? So I have two choices: to write – because I can’t not write – and never publish, or to write and publish but stand my ground where I can. I remain proud of all my previous work, but my favourite is always the one I’m writing, which I won’t talk about just yet. 7 External links Category:Living people Category:1983 births Category:1980s