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• Get your stories written, author urges

When a class of final year journalism students at the Durban University of Technology discussed a Daily News front page story about two serial hijackers earlier this year, little did they know that three of them would later be liaising with leading authors, including top South African crime writer, Mike Nicol, and journalism guru, Denis Beckett, about writing a book about the two dead men.

The students, Joel Burton, Sandile Gumede and Sabelo Nsele, are currently undergoing training with the Durban-based investigative journalism agency, Roving Reporters. The young writers’ opening package of stories, Tale of Two Hijackers, was recently published in two parts by the Daily News.

But this is just the start, compliments of a writing workshop with Beckett, and now the GetSmarter Write a Non-Fiction Story course run by Nicol in association with Random House Struik publishers.

Beckett reckons the students’ work on the story of two juvenile-offenders-turned-serial hijackers, Vivi Mthembu and Siphelele Shezi, has potential to be a kind of South African version of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood – a non-fiction novel detailing the gruesome murder in 1959 of Herbert Clutter, a wealthy Kansas, US farmer, his wife and two of their children.

“You’re cadet journalists, barely a published word to your names, jointly or individually, and what you’re working on has potential to be a global hit,” Beckett recently wrote to the students.

“The story hooks you from the word go,” says Nicol.