Elizabeth is six when the ANC wins the first democratic elections in South Africa. While most of the country celebrates freedom, the only difference she notices is the growing intensity of her fears. Fear remains a faithful companion to Elizabeth as she grows up. She fears the rubbish trucks in her childhood, the Valentine's Dance in high school, and the remote possibility of passing out in a gutter somewhere in her first year of university. The short stories in this collection feature a similar (and often contradictory) version of the protagonist, from Elizabeth's childhood in eastern Johannesburg to her early adult years in an uptight Cape Town neighbourhood. Each story deals with a dilemma unique to each life stage and should be read in isolation. But its neighbours in the collection reveal the recurring tensions that influence an identity. In Elizabeth's case, these include the role of her religion, her repressed racism, and the bizarre benefits of gross inequality. All of these contribute to her urge, as a white girl in post-apartheid South Africa, to peer across from her and check if she should be somewhere, or someone, else.

Goodbye Letter to the Living explores power and trust in relationships—how quickly even the most loving relationships can turn into contests or battles of will. It looks at how one's perception of something shapes their realty. In In and Out, a love-struck bartender hunts for her maybe-cheating boyfriend. In The Wizard Who Wasn't, a young boy tries to help his sister, and save his parents' marriage, with a groundless belief that he has magic. And in the titular story, a drowned woman watches from the ocean as her sister tries to navigate both her grief and their narcissistic mother. Above all, this collection asks how far we'll go for the ones we love and whether some distances are just too great to conquer.

Please note: creative writing works are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and fill out the appropriate web form. / Compendium of original fiction / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: creative writing works are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and fill out the appropriate web form. / Creative writing / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

Borderlord Scuttle is set in an alternate version of South Africa's Eastern Cape based on the fictional papers of a thief named JB Niemand and the story follows his first adventure. After the end of a relationship with an artist named Rebekah, JB Niemand's own artistic aspirations dashed. He is uninspired and directionless with no way to sustain himself, let alone pursue a career as a painter. To solve both problems he turns to a life of crime. With his profits he plans to complete a pilgrimage to Alice to see a Walter Battiss artwork that Rebekah claimed would finally make him the artist he dreamed of becoming. However, he is no master criminal. The story begins when JB Niemand finds himself in prison. At Middledrift Corrections JB Niemand develops a dependent and ambiguous relationship with Stix, a career criminal who will end up abandoning JB in the bush shortly after their escape from prison. Stix's betrayal catalyses JB's becoming and he is propelled into a journey that sees him attempting to join a gang of hill bandits who call themselves the Ninevites, drinking in a small town bar in The Settler Flats, and eventually making good on his plans to go to Alice.

In 1990's South Africa, Danny is haunted by the tragic death of his younger brother. When he moves with his parents to a small coastal town at the bottom of the world, he finds Clara, a bright haired girl with her own painful story. Together, they learn to live and love in a world which they seldom understand. Around them forces shape their paths in ways beyond their comprehension, and they must learn to navigate the lies of adults. Their relationship, naïve and pure, plays out in the Eden of their surroundings. When their longing for comfort from their individual pain drives them apart, Danny must decide if the truth will be able to keep them together and set him free. The brooding memory of his brother threatens to pull him apart, and leads him to a startling understanding. The Light by The Sea is a novel of unseen pain, innocent love and the coming of age journey of two young people trying to find the light again.

Summary in English.|Word processed copy.

Hyphen is a selection of twenty-eight poems (lyrical, narrative and persona poems) and two prose vignettes. The pieces explore ideas of memory, identity, emptiness, loss, love and joy. They are rooted in an itinerant experience of this world and question the concepts of belonging, home, usefulness, art, god and beauty. Most of the work has been inspired by places, moods and events in Mauritius, Saudi Arabia, England, Europe and South Africa. An individual's relationship to landscape, society and self, along with their personal interactions (with humans, animals and gods) form the basis for these poetic explorations of what it means to be in between. In between spaces. In between stages. Phases. Moods. Ideas. Weather patterns. People. In between here and there. Now and then. Home and away. Between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Includes abstract in Afrikaans and English. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-96). / This study is a creative exploration of the influence of trees on my poetry. My essay investigates the large number of trees that features in Afrikaans poetry, especially in Groot Verseboek. The relationship between a scientific interest in trees and a creative reflexion on this scientific knowledge is discussed.

Also available online. / one tongue singing is a novel which unfolds in two time-frames. In the first, a young unmarried French nurse comes to South Africa with her father and her small daughter during the closing years of apartheid. The family settles amongst a small wine-growing community in the Western Cape where they become involved in the lives of victims of the System. In the second frame, the daughter, now about nineteen years old, is a talented artist who enrols at the exclusive Art School of a womanising painter. The man walks a tightrope between popular success and a deep-seated fear of failure (linked to a growing awareness of being a fake). He has started to suffer from panic attacks.