Bryony's Blog

Ever since I was child, I have had a fascination for watching things grow.   When I was about ten, I kept glass jars on my windowsill in which I grew peas and watched, mesmerised, as their roots sprouted and spread.   I also kept onions in water, much to my mother’s consternation, and observed them sprouting.   My mum is a keen gardener and I loved going to nurseries with her as a child to buy flowers and shrubs.   I loved the organisational intricacies of gardening – leaving space for a shrub that might spread and a creeper that might climb and not planting this flower with that in case one dwarfed the other.   However, I was never really much of a gardener - as a student in the UK, I kept an African Violet called Shamwari, on my windowsill, but it never flowered and my attempts to grow things in pots also invariably met some form of disaster or another.                   In ...

  Looking back on my debut novel, This September Sun , I am conscious of how ambitious a project it was. It is a long book and it took a long time to write, but it also needed a fair amount of research. Researching the past, even if it is only the 1940s is not as easy in Zimbabwe as it may be in a place like Britain. There are not many books either written about or set in the time. Those that are, tend to be political history which, although relevant to a certain degree, are often rather tedious to read. Film coverage is not that easy – actually it is fairly impossible – to come by and I had to rely on newspapers in the archives and interviews with some now quite elderly people.   The former are fascinating. I could lose myself all day in old newspapers. They speak of fundraising balls, teas and fetes. They advertise luxury accommodation at hotels with porters and cars meeting each train, film reels at the cinema, a list of who’s in town and who’s st...

Africa is a big place.   Really big.   When you fly over it, you get a sense of its immenseness; everything from cities to mile upon mile of open ground.   In turn, it is easy to feel very small and insignificant, a mere dot on the landscape.                 As a writer in Africa, it is also easy to feel a sense of that aloneness.   I live in a small mining town called Solwezi in north-western Zambia.   If there are any other writers here, I certainly have not met them and I am not sure how I would.   There are no writers’ groups advertised, no literary events take place - and no one seems to be particularly perturbed. After all, why should they be?   Writing is a solitary job, isn’t it?   It’s just you and your notepad or your laptop.   What else do you need?                 I am sure...