International: June 2010 Archives

The issue central to this month's column actually came up during a panel discussion at the London Book Fair in April, so my apologies for only getting round to it now, but there've been equally pressing issues to write about in between.  Always assuming that in the heady world of crime thrillers, there are some issues more pressing than others, that is.  The LBF panel was to address the matter of writing crime fiction in South Africa.  As is the nature of these things, it did more than that.

The 'more than' part was about race - which, for those of us at the bottom of the African continent, is a topic that's never far from our everyday lives let alone our fiction.  In the run-up to the panel discussion I asked local crime novelists for their opinions on the main topic and ran them on my blog Crime Beat and then summarised them in my May column for ITW.  But the focus there was violence in our society and its representation in our fiction.  I felt the race issue needed a separate outing.