Blooming ’eck!
CAPE TOWN COLLECTIVE RECALL ILLUSTRIOUS FOREBEARS
ONLY a journalist in search of a headline would link the legendary Bloomsbury Group to the Kimberley Club in Cape Town. Different cities. Different centuries.
None of the Bloomsbury group was famous in the early 20th century when a random number of writers and intellectuals started to attend informal meetings in central London to discuss the issues of the day. They were united by a commitment to the value of writing, a commitment shared by a disparate group of writers and intellectuals who hold a monthly meeting at the Kimberley Hotel in Cape Town.
Perhaps “desperate” would be more apt than “disparate”. It’s hard to market the printed word in an increasingly digital world. Especially in a recession. And especially in South Africa where only a tiny proportion of the population ever buys a book.
In Cape Town, crime is the headline-grabber and so it’s fitting that two of the founder members of the Kimberley Club are among the leading writers of crime fiction in the country.
Peter Church’s Dark Video, one of the best-selling local crime novels in the year it was released and the follow-up, Bitter Pill, featured out an HIV peer education programme with male prisoners, while overseeing a project with women prisoners who make colourful, ethnic jewellery from waste material.
Rosemund Handler and I complete the group ; we both qualify for pensioners’ discounts and we have a publisher in common. Penguin has published three of Handler’s novels. The most recent, Tsamma Season, was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Handler has a passionate commitment to the preservation of the wilderness which she continues to explore. A vociferous political activist, the plot of her second novel Katy’s Kid was triggered by a night in a cell shared with two prostitutes after a student protest against apartheid. Madlands gives a harrowing insight into the bi-polar condition. She is currently finishing her fourth novel.
I have avoided political content, as far as is possible in a South African setting, in my own novels, also published by Penguin.
I knew from the outset of my comparatively recent career as an author that royalties from local sales would not provide a significant supplement to my pension fund, so I have chosen subjects such as autism in the hope of appealing to an international audience.
No foreign publishers have yet started to squabble over the rights in my case but Penguin has an official digital strategy; my fourth novel, Below Luck Level, which deals with Alzheimer’s will have an e-book edition when published, as will my novels on their backlist.
Let’s hope the technology of the new millennium will propel me and my fellow Kimberlites into the same strata as the Bloomsbury
group!