‘Some stories start in the middle because no one wants to hear the beginning.’

Rešoketšwe Manenzhe chatted to Jennifer Malec recently about her debut novel Scatterlings.

Scatterlings won the 2021 HSS Award for Fiction by a Single Author, and also received the 2020 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award.

Malec is editor of The Johannesburg Review of Books and a Dinaane judge.

The conversation covered Manenzhe’s experience of writing her first book, how she got published, and how she dreamt up the extraordinary yet ordinary women that appear in her novel.

The pair also explored whether authors need to ‘write what you know’, and how that ties to writing historical fiction.

Watch the video: