Damon Galgut
Damon Galgut
Damon Galgutis an award-winning South African playwright and novelist...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth12 November 1963
amoral needs watch
Something in a writer's brain needs to watch everything with a detached, amoral eye.
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I long for a South African society that's free of ideological forces - no society can ever really be free of ideological forces - but I wish it was free of power.
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Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.
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I wrote large chunks of 'The Impostor' and 'The Good Doctor' on a beach in Goa.
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Perhaps cliche is nothing more than the weight of the past pinning down your mind. In this sense, imaginative freedom is a way of finding the future, though it isn't so easy to do.
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Being gay myself, I'm naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women.
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I think the impulse took shape in early childhood when I was very ill with lymphoma for a number of years. I spent a lot of time in hospitals and sick-rooms, being read to by various relatives, and I learned to associate books with love and attention.
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Stationery gets me excited because it has an individual character, unlike computers, which may be convenient but are generic and bland.
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Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.
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'Arctic Summer,' as you might know, is the title of Forster's one unfinished novel.
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It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.
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I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.
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While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.
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Unrequited affection is very painful for the lover, but it can have unexpected, creative consequences.