Damon Galgut
Damon Galgut
Damon Galgutis an award-winning South African playwright and novelist...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth12 November 1963
drawn men naturally rather women
Being gay myself, I'm naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women.
advantage apartheid foreign growing outside placed seemed society
Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.
definitely incapable
I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.
baths cape forest sunday turkish walks
I go for long walks in Newlands Forest in Cape Town, and I go to the Turkish baths on Sunday mornings.
almost last nine passage periods stuck writers
Most writers battle with periods of being blocked; it's almost an occupational hazard. But in the writing of his last and greatest novel, 'A Passage to India,' E. M. Forster got stuck for nine years.
associate books early hospitals ill impulse learned love number shape spent time took various
I think the impulse took shape in early childhood when I was very ill with lymphoma for a number of years. I spent a lot of time in hospitals and sick-rooms, being read to by various relatives, and I learned to associate books with love and attention.
chunks good large wrote
I wrote large chunks of 'The Impostor' and 'The Good Doctor' on a beach in Goa.
There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.
behind motivation needs obsession
Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.
computers convenient excited generic gets individual unlike
Stationery gets me excited because it has an individual character, unlike computers, which may be convenient but are generic and bland.
fullest human interests nature takes
Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.
bound buy fountain notebooks work
I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India.
directly experience few society traveling zones
Traveling is one of few zones of experience where you are not directly plugged into the world around you. You're not part of the society you're passing through.
african civil covert dark extremely happened levels played south state time ugly war
I think there's something very dark in the South African psyche. I think we live a lot of the time in a state of a very low-grade civil war; the levels of violence in South Africa are extremely high. In a way, the civil war that never happened is being played out in a covert way, so we live with a lot of very ugly things.