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

Almost overnight, white people have gone from being very powerful to potentially irrelevant. Their future in South Africa is not what many had envisaged, so it involves a lot of reinvention.

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.

We all belong to South Africa, and South Africa belongs to us all.

In South Africa, we speak English and sometimes Afrikaans, sometimes Zulu, sometimes Xhosa.

If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.