One of Penguin’s most respected authors, Marguerite Poland has successfully mastered writing for both children and adults. In 2003, in collaboration with artist Leigh Voigt and Professor David Hammond-Tooke, Poland wrote the highly acclaimed T he Abundant Herds: a Celebration of the Nguni Cattle of the Zulu People, based on her doctoral thesis. She is one of South Africa’s best-loved novelists, whose works include Shades, Recessional for Grace,and Taken Captive by Birds. Her latest book, The Keeper (Penguin) was released last month.
Islands have always intrigued me (no wonder my most recent novel, The Keeper, is set on one) – but not the ubiquitous idyllic, palm-fringed variety. I am drawn to the remote, isolated, bird-infested outcrops of inhospitable seas. So it is that Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines(2012) about St Kilda attracted me. It is the most far-flung of Scotland’s many hundreds of islands. The book is about a journey to a spot so lost and forbidding the population was removed 70 years ago to leave it to the wild sheep, the gannets, the killer whales and the ancient stone dwellings that pre-date the druids.
But if I were to choose a tropical island, it would be Zanzibar for its richly-textured history, its intrigue – and its menace.
Thus, I was absorbed in Tuan Marais’ Painted Devils and the Land of Ordinary Men(2014) – a memoir of an extraordinary upbringing orchestrated by an eccentric mother with a horror of raising a son who might become an “ordinary man”. As a child the author ran wild on Zanzibar before it was decreed that, perhaps, an education might be useful.