NOVEMBER 2008

The Selwa Anthony Author Management company held their annual Sassy Awards ceremony at the Novotel Brighton during November. Juanita Phillips from ABC TV News in Sydney made the presentations. I was honoured to receive the award as the 'Quiet Achiever' for 2008 in recognition of my five heavily-researched books within the space of five and a half years.

Over one hundred authors, publishers, editors and others in the industry attended the full-day seminar and 170 were there for the formal dinner and presentation ceremony in the evening.

Selwa Anthony has been organising the seminar and Sassy Awards for many years in her continuing and very generous support of Australian authors in general, and popular fiction writers in particular.

AUGUST 2008

With my latest book, The Last Maasai Warrior awaiting publication by Harper Collins, it was time to visit Kenya again to research my next book.

Like many friends of Kenya, I had been reading with dismay the news of the violence that hit the country following the December 2007 elections. I wanted to see and hear for myself what effect this had on the lives of ordinary Kenyans.

What I found was a society still in shock from seeing their country torn apart by a level of inter-tribal violence not seen in living memory. The centre of the violence had been in the squatter settlements of Kibera - a Nairobi suburb containing around a million people within a couple of square miles. Kibera is a no-go area to the uninitiated. Through friends, I found someone to be my guide and I spent days talking to people who had witnessed horrific events, and others whose lives had been profoundly affected by the post-election violence.

I met a painter who was innocently caught between a rioting group of Kiberan youths and an ill-disciplined police force out for revenge rather than to uphold the law. An AK47 fractured his hip. He couldn't afford the operation and barely had enough to buy the crutches he needed. Now, eight months later, he still needs the crutches and has not been able to work. Even in a squatter settlement there is rent and school fees to pay. A difficult life had quickly become unsustainable.

And there was the Kikuyu artist who had grown up amongst his Luo friends and neighbours. He described the demons of doubt that haunted him every day. When would one of those friends or neighbours turn on him and denounce him to the mob?

I came away from that experience with a very different novel to what I had in mind when I went there. In Kibera there are few formal authority structures - the police will not enter Kibera after dark. But through various non-government organisations, community-based groups and the determination of the many hard-working, honest  residents to maintain the peace, there is an amazing cohesion and order in what otherwise appears to be chaos.

My sixth novel (due out in April 2010) will attempt to relate some of these stories.

MAY 2008

It was an honour and a pleasure to be inivited to address the May meeting of the Society of Women's Writers at the State Library of NSW.

APRIL 2008

I'm always on the lookout for stories that are out of Africa, so when I received an email from a man who said he had lived for many years in Kenya, I thought I should make some further enquiries. What I received in reply was astonishing.

Ninety-six-year-old Brian Goord sent me a memoir of his life in Africa, where he described arriving with his wife and year-old son in 1948. With no prior experience, Brian set about farming his land at Eldama Ravine in the highlands overlooking the Great Rift Valley. In the following years he and his family had to cope with all the usual trials found in farming, but in addition there was the Mau Mau emergency, the threat of dangerous predators and stock and plant diseases that few people understand.

In addition to his busy life managing a farm and the eighty Africans who lived and worked on it, Brian became a district councillor responsible for public health and social services in an area covering some 5000 square miles.

I wanted to meet this man and was soon on a flight to Christchurch, New Zealand, where I met Brian, and we talked for hours while he showed me his priceless old home movies of the farm and travels around the country.

I was kindly invited to stay at Claremont (http://www.claremontestate.com/) with Brian's son Richard and wife Rosie, who was also born and raised in Africa. Claremont lodge is itself an inspirational setting, ideal for the great stories the Goord family had to relate.

I was very envious of Brian and his life in Kenya at a most interesting time in its historical journey - a time that most people can only visualize through the sepia-coloured pages of history books. With the Goord's recollections of times gone by, I let my imagination take flight into stories as yet unwritten.

Read more of Brian's story by clicking here.

More news can be found in the archives.