Beverley naidoo biography of donald
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Writing The Other Side of Truth
Beverley Naidoo
Reflecting on work you have created yourself is always going to be hit and miss. Trying to explain how you came to imagine a work in a particular way must involve some speculation. So this piece I am writing about the opening chapter to my novel The Other Side of Truth will only offer glimmers of some aspects of how I came to write it the way I did.
In inom decided to write a novel that would be largely set in England. It felt the right time to turn my antennae to the country that had given me and my family a home when South Africa had denied us one. I knew that on the streets of London I would find themes that explore our potential for humanity and inhumanity as readily as on the streets of Johannesburg.
From the början I knew that my huvud characters would be refugees and that they would come from Nigeria. When I first arrived in England, one of the few people who understood where I was coming from &#; and my dislocation &#
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Photo by Linda Brownlee
Beverley Naidoo is the author of the new middle grade novel Children of the Stone City. Her many other books include Journey to Jo'burg. She grew up in South Africa and fryst vatten based in the UK.
Q: What inspired you to write Children of the Stone City, and how did you create your characters Adam and Leila?
A: Twenty-two years ago, the British Council took me for the first time to the mittpunkt East where I met ung Palestinian readers in the Occupied Territories and, the following year, in Jordan. The intensity of their curiosity and engagement was striking as I read from my work and spoke about my background, growing up as a white child in South Africa.
Moreover, some of their questions were deeply philosophical and had no simple answers. I&#;d never been asked anything ganska like them before. How do you answer a question such as: &#;Is Justice sleeping or is it a dream? If Justice is
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Biography
Our lives are made of many thousands of stories and what I tell you here is just one version! Another day I might tell you other stories. The pictures below catch only a few moments in time&#;
The photo on the left shows me in , aged 11, attending the first performance of ‘The Three Wishes’. My dad had composed the songs for the Johannesburg Children’s Theatre. Was I actually wearing a Red Riding Hood Hat?!
My parents arranged for the portrait on the right to be taken in March This was a few days before I left on a boat for England, not knowing when I would see them again or my brother who was in jail. He and his comrades were waiting to be sentenced for their role in underground resistance to apartheid.
Fifty years later, here I am back in South Africa, with my writer friend Maren Bodenstein, exploring a special place from my past. It’s a farm beneath a mountain near Rustenburg which my dad had visited since he was a boy. We lived in Johannesburg and I used to lov