Conversations with Writers

Sheer Magic By Alexander James Daniel Abelman was sixteen when he stumbled upon the battered corpse of a murdered black man at the side of a remote dirt road in South Africa . He called the police who swung the body onto the back of a dusty pickup truck. "Don’t you want my statement … you know … for your investigation?" Daniel asked. The boss cop’s reply numbed him: "Investigation? Are you bloody mad, kid? It’s just another kaffir." That’s when young Daniel decided to leave what had been the Beloved Country -- and the adventure began. Daniel had been born in the busy South African shipping city of Port Elizabeth on the coast of the Indian Ocean in 1958. It was also the body-surfing capital of the world, and as a tot, he learned to swim long before he could walk. Later, unknowingly, he started to play the illusion game that became his life and fueled his bitingly satirical novel of skullduggery, Allakazzam! He said: It was a pleasant four-mile dow...

Wendy Mewes lives and works in Finistere and has been teaching and writing about history for more than 25 years. Her non-fiction books include Crossing Brittany (2008); The Nantes-Brest Canal: a Guide (2007) and Discovering the History of Brittany (2006) -- which focus on the history and attractions of Brittany. She has also written and published two novels, Moon Garden (2004), a novel of love, growth and natural magic, and, The Five of Cups (2006), which explores explores love, loss and renewal. In this email interview, Wendy Mewes talks about her writing: When did you start writing? I wrote my first ‘book’ when I was eight. It was about ancient Greece and I still have the faded pages of careful handwriting tied together with cotton. I remember consulting many books in the library and my father’s collection and enjoying the process of selecting information and telling things in my own words. Since childhood I intended to be a writer, recognising it as a fundamental p...