The Big Read: When Fezikile Cokile was 13, he visited a library for the first time. The squat, face-brick building was quite some distance from his home in East London's sprawling Mdantsane township, but for this young boy - who grew up in a house in which books were an unimagined luxury - the taxi ride he took that day became a trip that changed his life.

In the library's children's section he discovered a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Despite the first nine pages being missing, he took it home and, in short order, utterly fell in love with writing, with English and with JK Rowling.

"I love that woman. I read her book and I loved it, and I think that is what sparked my interest in writing," Cokile said.

It is a passion that has paid off. Earlier this month, the 19-year-old's most fervent wish - to be a published writer - came true when his book Wish Upon A Star became the fifth novel published by Sapphire Press, the recently launched romance imprint of Kwela Books.

Cokile found the publisher's address on the title page of a library book when he was in grade 9 at Mdantsane's Nyameko High School. He wrote it down and two years later submitted his first novel, Stolen Moments, which was rejected. Last year he sent another novel, Dusty Life, to Kwela, but the story, about township life, also found its way back to its writer.

But he knew that the frequent rejections did not mean that he was pursuing an unattainable goal.

"I knew it was coming," he said. "It was only a matter of time. Kwela didn't say my stories were bad, and I know I'm a good storyteller. That's why I knew it was going to happen, especially with Wish Upon A Star. I was confident they were going to take it."

Cokile's excitement about the publication of his novel is dizzying and, at the same time, tempered by his personal experience that, if you grow up dirt poor in a township in Eastern Cape, nothing can be taken for granted. He did not tell a soul other than his best friend and his two sisters, Bulelwa and Nombulelo, that Sapphire Press had accepted his novel.

"I was too scared that I would jinx it and that they would not publish my book," he said.

He has his own bedroom in the four-room cement-block house that he shares with his sisters, and it is on his double bed that he writes his novels - longhand, in a small, obsessively neat script. Only two of the 10 chapters of Wish Upon A Star were submitted electronically to the publisher; the rest were sent by post, written in longhand.

Cokile first encountered computers and the Internet when he was a first-year law student at the University of Fort Hare's East London campus last year.

"I had never typed before; I had never touched a computer in my life. But I'd ask someone sitting next to me, 'How do you do this? How do you get a capital letter?' And I picked it up fast."

But, despite five distinctions at the end of his first year, he was not allowed to register for a second.

"I don't have the money. I owe them more than R14000, so they did not allow me back."

Cokile's parents, both of whom are dead, were never well off and currently Nombulelo is the sole breadwinner of the family.

"Would I have been kicked out of school if my parents were still alive?" he wonders. "I think so. My mother was a hawker at The Highway: I don't think she would have been able to pay my tuition fees."

Cokile's year at university took him further from home than he'd ever been. Before he started the daily commute by train to the campus on the outskirts of East London, the only place outside Mdantsane he had visited was Port Elizabeth.

Wish Upon A Star is set in the heart of Cape Town and tells the story of a supermodel, Lathoya Mthathi, and her complicated love for Siso Masilela, the handsome editor of Men's Life, a big-city magazine.

In order to write the novel, Cokile had to draw on an imagination that is fed by a constant stream of books, magazines and television.

"There were never any books at home," he said. "I was the only one who wanted to read in my family, and that's why I had to go to the library to get books."

• SMS "romance" to 34525 to order a copy of Wish Upon A Star, or visit kwela.com. For information about the Campaign for School Libraries, visit www.equaleducation.org.za