SA authors make the passage to Edinburgh

From Damon Galgut revisiting an eminent author's unrequited love to Lauren Beukes explaining how to pronounce her surname, South African writers are preparing to join the literary greats at the Edinburgh festival.

Beukes, author of The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters, will take part in a panel discussion with fellow South African CA Davids, whose book The Blacks of Cape Town has been described as an "astonishingly assured debut".

For Beukes, it will be her second time at the festival. "It's one of the best festivals I've been to. I love the energy and the panels. Last year, I met Ian Rankin and all kinds of really interesting and intense people," she said.

She believes South African literature is definitely "making waves" internationally and rattles off a host of local writers she admires, saying: "I don't know if we're the next Scandinavia."

Her books have earned her global recognition, along with the inevitable mangling of her surname. "I give them the Anglicised version. I tell them Beukes rhymes with mucus," she said.

"I'm really excited to be with CA Davids, who is a talented writer with a fine voice."

Davids's book traces a woman's investigation of her family's past and the sins she might be forced to bear. Her search begins with her grandfather, "self-named Isaiah Black, had been classified as mixed, had passed as white and given rise to a line of coloured children and grandchildren".

Galgut's new novel, Arctic Summer, imagines EM Forster's travels to India and the experiences that gave rise to A Passage to India.

"I read a lot of biographies, especially of writers, and Forster's life story struck me as interesting. I was drawn in particular to the 11 years in which he wrote Passage, because it seemed clear to me that his book grew out of his unrequited love for one Indian man, Masood, and I thought that by telling the story of that relationship I could also tell the story of what goes into the writing of a novel," said Galgut.

Book festivals have grown in importance, he says, because they are a "return to first principles: being in a room with the storyteller".

"Books, in the digital age, have become easy to reproduce and disseminate endlessly. By contrast, what can't be replicated is the experience of meeting the person who wrote the book. That's a singular event, like theatre," said Galgut.

His own reading tastes are mostly "retrospective".

"Work that is currently appearing is often hyped and overpraised, so I prefer to let time judge. This is a way of saying that I mostly read dead authors, who won't be going to any festivals."