Damon Galgut
Damon Galgut
Damon Galgutis an award-winning South African playwright and novelist...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth12 November 1963
amoral needs watch
Something in a writer's brain needs to watch everything with a detached, amoral eye.
becomes highly issues quite south
South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.
affection painful unrequited
Unrequited affection is very painful for the lover, but it can have unexpected, creative consequences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
african forces power society south wish
I long for a South African society that's free of ideological forces - no society can ever really be free of ideological forces - but I wish it was free of power.
definitely incapable
I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.
believe close draw pushing sentences
I like to believe that if you pay close attention to the sentences as they unfold, they will draw you in rather than pushing you away.