Vernon RL Head is a birdwatcher and an award-winning environmentalist. He is also a South African poet, a bestselling novelist and an internationally acclaimed architect. His first book – a nonfiction narrative – The search for the rarest bird in the world, was longlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times Alan Paton Literature Prize and has recently been translated into Arabic and other languages. His first novel, A tree for the birds, was longlisted for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize and shortlisted for the National Institute of Humanities & Social Sciences 2020 Fiction Prize. His poetry was longlisted for the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Prize in 2014, 2017 and again in 2019. He has an MA in Creative Writing (UCT) and he writes for various international literary magazines.
In this interview, he talks to a fellow writer, Mphuthumi Ntabeni, for LitNet.
MN: Thank you very much for agreeing to do this.
I am sure you’re asked this a lot, but I’m going to dogpile on it anyway. Do you not get enough space to explore your creative juices in your architectural practice? What compelled you to be a writer – and not just any writer, but one that delves into various genres: from poetry to creative nonfiction with a scientific and environmental angle, to prose fiction with historical and philological interrogations in your recent novel, On that wave of gulls?
VH: Architecture is wonderfully creative; a rewarding profession, to be sure; perhaps even a way of life; and a kind of spatial journey that is really the manipulation of light. But that in itself is not enough for me, and so I seem to have turned to the wilderness in the hope of seeing more – more answers, more forms, more hope – and perhaps an enquiring glance at how that edge, where we end and nature begins, might have routes to our sense of place.
The way light glitters through the leaves of a tree is, for me, immensely life-affirming and is of that tranquillity-holding sanctuary that we surely seek at every moment – inspiring, of course, in an artistic sense, and full of answers and literary music. And it was this searching – the birdwatching really, I guess – that led me to writing (very much like architecture comes initially as explorative, loose sketching, led by idea, concept, story). In a way, for me, writing is another kind of view of the world, with words and sentences and stanzas that seem to have allowed me to redefine myself under the trees: to re-see. And to have an opportunity to move between the poem, the traditional prose form, the nonfiction narrative and even the literary collage that I am now exploring, is to linger in the in between, a wholly new adventure.
Of course, what I have said here is really a pursuit of the beginnings of an interrogation of liminality: edges are fecund in every way. We need to roam there as artists. And philological questions wait like things of pure joy there. Where poetry becomes prose, for example, what a place for light, for tree light.
Read more here:
Mphuthumi Ntabeni is a South African author living in Cape Town. His debut novel The Broken River Tent won the University of Johannesburg Debut Novel Prize in 2019. He worked with the drama department of Rhodes University on two plays he wrote for the South African National Arts Festival about Maqoma and his half-brother Sandile, both of whom had been Xhosa chiefs. He has a passionate interest in South Africa’s frontier history and the wars of land dispossession. His most recent novel The Wanderers was published in 2021.
