5 MINUTES WITH SHUBNUM KHAN
The Durban author tells YOU about her spellbinding tale about love, life and a strange, old house
WHEN local author Shubnum Khan set to work on her new novel, The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil, she wanted to write a love story. “But when I started it, I realised you couldn’t tell a story about love without telling a story about life,” she says.
Akbar Manzil isn’t a person but rather a sprawling mansion near Durban and this is the epic tale of two women who live in it eight decades apart and the terrible secrets that it holds.
“It’s a bit of adventure, a bit of a love story, a bit of a horror and a bit of fantasy – it’s going to take you on a journey through many different feelings,” Shubnum says.
It’s very different from her previous book, How I Accidentally Became a Global Stock Photo, which was a collection of essays that, among other things, told the story of how Shubnum agreed to pose for pictures to help someone with his “art project” and then discovered that her image was instead being used to sell everything from McDonald’s to make-up.
We catch up with the Durban author.
WAS YOUR NEW NOVEL EASY TO WRITE OR WAS
IT A STRUGGLE?
It was a struggle and took me over 10 years. I was in my mid-20s when I started it, and I was recovering from heartbreak and figuring out my future and for a long time I felt hopeless and didn’t have the confidence to finish the novel. But as time went by and I started to regain my confidence and love for writing I was ready to do this story some kind of justice.
WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT LIVING IN DURBAN? I’ve come to know this city so well – how it breathes and feels and tastes and sounds during different seasons. I love that it’s so green and lush and also overlooked. This is an integral part of my novel: how we overlook the forgotten, the lost, the alone.
YOUR NOVEL IS PUBLISHED INTERNATIONALLY. HOW DOES IT FEEL TO MAKE FOREIGN READERS AWARE OF DURBAN AND SOUTH AFRICA? It’s a nice feeling to know you can bring a place alive to someone who may have never known it exists. The New York Times even recommended the novel and I’ve had interviewers in the US ask me about the city and what they should do first if they visit. We need more stories about the hidden and forgotten places, especially in the global south.
IS WRITING YOUR FULL-TIME JOB?
In the beginning, I had to supplement it with a lot of odds and ends jobs – teaching, freelance writing, copywriting and creating art but thankfully with time and the US publishing deal, I can do it full-time now.
ARE YOU STILL AN ACCIDENTAL STOCK PHOTO MODEL?
I was on billboards on highways in India in 2021 but since then I haven’t heard anything, thankfully!