Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - October 10, 2004

Her excitement infected me for a moment, but I quickly composed myself and returned to the serious discussion of how best to communicate the fact that Aids was a dire threat to the world.

As a writer, it is assumed that I would know how to balance dread and optimism. Afterwards I admitted to myself that I was really trying to dampen my own expectations. Work is an escape from the fear of unrealised expectations.

This was one month after moving from New York to Geneva, where I took a job as advocacy director for UNAIDS.

Three years before, I left Johannesburg for the US, to write. For almost two years I was a "kept man", writing day and night.

The result: dozens of poems, many short stories, a childhood memoir and another very difficult novel set in 1960s Johannesburg. The response to the memoir prompted me to keep my work to myself.

The reaction from South Africa: it was too steeped in the past, too "township". Even at home people were yearning for that mythical "new" South African novel. Our history, in which my childhood played a small part, no longer mattered.

One morning I woke up and realised that it was time to take up a day job again. Luckily I found something in a field that I am passionate about: Aids.

The novel Bitter Fruit had, until the Booker, also experienced a rather precarious passage. Not only in South Africa where the 2001 publication was largely ignored by the English-language media. It elicited an excited response from the Afrikaans-language press and commentators. But sadly, this does not stimulate sales of a "difficult" local novel.

That definition - "difficult" - continued to haunt the book abroad. That's how publishers in the US, Holland and Germany characterised the novel. International tastes were no different from those in South Africa.

This veered between two extremes, it seemed. One focused on the idyllic, almost pastoral Africa, where hope resides in the peaceful village and the grey-bearded wisdom of the elders.

The other wanted to see the continent depicted in all its gory devastation; Aids, poverty, strife. What Bitter Fruit offered was a very urban story filled with characters that lived complex and very contemporary lives. And it ended on a strangely optimistic note, the themes of rape, incest and murder notwithstanding.

But a persistent agent, Isobel Dixon, herself a transplanted South African and a courageous London publisher, Grove Atlantic, changed that. Published in the UK last year, Bitter Fruit was short-listed for the 2003 Dublin Impac Award; now it has made the Booker short list.

At the age of 55, my life as a writer could change dramatically. In my lonelier moments I have considered abandoning the idea of being a "published" writer. I could of course never stop writing. It is too much of an obsession; but it would be private, for my gratification and as relief from the relentless aura of struggle that working in Aids creates.

But the Booker announcement changed all that. I have a chance of winning - a long, 25 to 1 shot, they tell me. But even being short-listed has made a difference. Translation offers from Greece, Holland, Russia and Italy are pouring in; Grove Atlantic's sister companies in the US and Canada had added it to their lists even before the Booker came along.

Yes, and all of this has re-awakened a certain alertness in my mind; my imagination has been whetted as it were, and I am constantly looking out for stories. Something that had been dulled for a while. Recognition is a sweet, seductive feeling.

Yet, there is a sense of sadness. Will my work be acknowledged primarily outside of my own country? Most of my previous books are out of print there. Bitter Fruit will soon follow. I don't blame my local publisher. Annari van der Merwe of Kwela Press is also a "courageous" publisher.

It will fall victim to the "economy of scale" rule; not enough people buy books, unit costs are too high, VAT is a burden, etcetera, etcetera.

So we "part-timers", as a BBC journalist called those of us who earn our living doing other things, come and go.

Occasionally, we shake up the literary world and then go back to our day jobs. How banal this is made to sound, no matter what it is that we do. Yes, we too have to earn money for bread, wine, rent, alimony, all the essentials of life. Maybe having that "dull" daily job is not such a bad thing. In fact, mine is challenging and rewarding, and it keeps me in touch with the real world.

Everyone wants to "make it big" internationally, and it would be gross self-deception to deny that I want to.

Yet it would be even better if more South Africans bought - and read - my books and those of other South African writers. It somehow is more satisfying to see your books on sale at Johannesburg International than at Heathrow.

Dangor is the author of three novels, three poetry collections, numerous short stories, plays and film scripts. The winner of the Man Booker Prize will be announced on October 19.

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