What inspired you to write The Year The Gypsies Came?

This story came to me almost 10 years ago in a moment of quiet contemplation. It was about 2am and I couldn't sleep. The original words tumbled out of me in a thirteen-page short story called Gypsies that I finished by daybreak.
 
The idea of writing about a dysfunctional family in a dysfunctional society and how love in all its many forms would be the glue to mend such a fractured family and country was the inspiration for my story.
 

What was it like growing up in South Africa in the late 1960s?

I have been living in the United States since I was a young adult, but I still think often of the land of my birth, South Africa, and know that its very soil is part of my soul.
 
It always pained me to have grown up in a country where there were so clearly the haves and have-nots and skin colour was all that determined which camp one fell into. I was fortunate enough to have been born into a family of the "haves". As such, I thought often, even as a child, growing up in a liberal white household, that healing and closing the giant cracks between black and white would be the ultimate triumph for such a fragmented and yet so noble a land.
 

There is great depth and lucidity in the characters you have created, are the Iris's based on a real family?

As writers, I think we draw from our own personal lives when creating characters, but it is the seeds of emotional truth rather than the exact replica of personalities that one builds a fictional character from in a novel. While there are some aspects of my own family in the Iris' I am blessed to have wonderful parents and two fabulous sisters, who are all, thankfully, alive and well!
 

Who are your favourite writers?

My favourite new author is Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner). Others include Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alice Hoffman, Margaret Atwood, Tobias Wolff, Ernest Hemmingway, Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner, J.K. Rowling. Enid Blyton was my all time favourite author as a child.
 

The Year The Gypsies Came is an incredibly striking debut, can you give us any clues on what to expect next from you?

My next book, working title, "Ruby Red" is also set in South Africa and covers a period of time in 1976 -- the year of the Soweto Riots. It is told though the eyes of 17 year old Ruby, a young girl who lives in a household where her liberal parents defy the laws of apartheid. The theme of acceptance, in its many forms, transcends all aspects of this novel: "They lifted the veil of ignorance from my eyes at a tender age and let me see that the world we lived in was wrong. That people should not live in separate areas or ride in separate buses or be treated differently because of the colour of their skin. But in lifting the veil from my young eyes they created another kind of division. They separated me from all my peers. I lived in a secret world that existed behind our large iron gates where black people in 1976 apartheid South Africa were treated as equals."