When I was five years old, I asked my teacher if I could write a story. Which was surprising: kids usually ask to go to the toilet. But I told stories to my classmates at breaktime, often improvising them as I went along. For better or for worse, I had inherited the genes of story-tellers from my forebears. My father read me the myths and legends of Greece and Rome. I won an essay prize at the age of 12 and the divine madness of being a writer set in. I wrote my first stories in the 1970s, my first musical in the early 1980s, my first radio play in 1986, my first stories broadcast on radio in the early-1990s and my first youth novel was published in 1998.
Divine madness, indeed. Writing is a solitary occupation. Blessed are those who work in tandem with someone else. But few works of worth have been done by committees. I’m a writer. As a somnambulist wakes, I find myself at it.
At a monastery in South Korea
Willem van der Walt 