The main project I undertook at STIAS was a collection of short fictions called 101 Detectives. The collection brings together 11 texts, including some that were revised and completed at STIAS and some that were originated and drafted there. The book explores the interplay of private and public experience and the dynamics of genres and conventional forms. It is also concerned with continuity and deletion. The book has been accepted for publication locally and internationally: it will be published in South Africa by Umuzi (Cape Town) in the last quarter of 2014 and in the USA and UK by And Other Stories (London) in the first half of 2015.
The second project I worked on was a novel provisionally titled The Man in the Street. The book was started during my residency and is still in progress. Herman Charles Bosman once wrote: ‘When a city has got enough incongruities you feel that you can live in it.’ But how much incongruity is enough? How much can a person stand? Such questions are at the heart of the novel. It is set in Johannesburg in the present and tells of people struggling to live at ease in a troublesome place.
