“I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction...” — Damon Galgut Quote

I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.

I try to get going early, on the assumption that the way you begin your day is the way you continue. But certain books only want to be written at night, so there's no hard rule where work is concerned.

For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise.

I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.

There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.

I am very proud to be African. I want to defend African people, and I want to show to the world that African players can be as good as the Europeans and South Americans.

I don't want to be a race-transcending leader. I want to be deeply understood as a man, as African- American, as a Christian, all that I am.

The reason I'm in San Diego is not because I want distance from South Africa but because I want proximity to the people I love. But I don't envy growing up in America. As ugly as aspects of it were, my biggest blessing was to be born a South African.

Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.