Rian Malan was one of the first younger writers to perceive and write about a darkness in the South African psyche that goes deeper than mere politics. To some extent, that's my territory, too.

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

I long for a South African society that's free of ideological forces - no society can ever really be free of ideological forces - but I wish it was free of power.

I think there's something very dark in the South African psyche. I think we live a lot of the time in a state of a very low-grade civil war; the levels of violence in South Africa are extremely high. In a way, the civil war that never happened is being played out in a covert way, so we live with a lot of very ugly things.

I've been wanting to write a book about what goes into creating a novel, and the story behind 'A Passage to India' is especially interesting.

South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.