Damon Galgut

Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation. ”

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion. ”

There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing. ”

Perhaps cliche is nothing more than the weight of the past pinning down your mind. In this sense, imaginative freedom is a way of finding the future, though it isn't so easy to do. ”

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. ”

India I have visited a great many times, though there is a lot about it I will never understand. ”

Being gay myself, I'm naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women. ”

Yoga helps me with a composed and serene state of mind, which is good for writing. ”

I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out. ”

Most writers battle with periods of being blocked; it's almost an occupational hazard. But in the writing of his last and greatest novel, 'A Passage to India,' E. M. Forster got stuck for nine years. ”