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.
great though visited
India I have visited a great many times, though there is a lot about it I will never understand.
abstract apartheid changed distant fascinated generation growing people whom
I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.
form truth unsettling
It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.
african confess south
I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.
behind goes passage wanting
I've been wanting to write a book about what goes into creating a novel, and the story behind 'A Passage to India' is especially interesting.
becomes highly issues quite south
South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.
change radical stories subject trauma
Any radical change or trauma always makes for interesting subject matter, but then all stories deal, to some extent, with the disjuncture between past and present.
might unfinished
'Arctic Summer,' as you might know, is the title of Forster's one unfinished novel.
cliche easy finding freedom future perhaps though weight
Perhaps cliche is nothing more than the weight of the past pinning down your mind. In this sense, imaginative freedom is a way of finding the future, though it isn't so easy to do.
deeper goes mere perceive politics psyche south writers younger
Rian Malan was one of the first younger writers to perceive and write about a darkness in the South African psyche that goes deeper than mere politics. To some extent, that's my territory, too.
against bump events fiction form measured persuade readers whether work writers
One of the questions writers bump up against in their work, whether they know it or not, is about lying. Because fiction is a form of deceit, and one's abilities are measured by how convincingly one can persuade readers that these events really happened.
centre ended hoping interest work
I first went to India because of my interest in yoga, hoping to go to the Iyengar Centre in Pune for a while. That didn't work out, but I ended up on a beach in Goa, writing.
almost fix good household incredibly obsession order paint point rather reach sit starting tap wall
Writing is very good for household tasks. Because you'd rather fix a dripping tap or paint an old wall - you'd rather do almost anything than sit and write. I have to reach a point of obsession in order to write, and so I find starting a book incredibly difficult.