BOOKS-ZIMBABWE: Writer Finds The Right Publisher

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

HARARE, Jan 19 1999 (IPS) - Zimbabwe-based author, Kelvin Mason is no stranger to receiving letters of rejection from publishers, which, he says, should not frustrate fledging writers.

“I had three rejections in five years,” Mason recalls. “As an author you have to deal with it.”

His latest book, ‘The Advent of The Incredulous Stigmata Man’, was published by Citron Press, Britain’s new publishing house, in London last year. “It’s one of those novels the publisher took risks to publish,” he says.

Mason says he began writing the book, which was launched in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare on Jan. 14, when he briefly left Zimbabwe for Glasgow, Scotland, in 1992.

The 220-page book sheds light on the “strange” alliance between the British Tory Party and the Scottish environmentalists.

In the book, the forces of the right, the Tory or the Conservatives, have found a natural ally in the conservation movement. The book’s main character, Mick, who unwittingly tries to defile a garden on one of the city’s squares where the very rich lived when he badly needed to relieve himself, is saved from street execution by a supernatural force. Stigmatised, he flees for his life with his best-friend’s girlfriend and her brother, a world-wise dwarf.

Kathy and Tam have their own reasons for escaping the sadistic agents of the all-powerful Extended European Community (EEC). Kathy is pregnant and believes the baby is Mick’s. Mick knows different. The EEC commissioner is expecting Tam for dinner. The hunt is on. In a cataclysmic showdown the full meaning of Mick’s mixed blessing is revealed.

Mason was born in Wales, but has worked in Sri Lanka, Nicarague, Peru and — “the most exotic” — Glasgow. He now lives in Zimbabwe.

He was educated at Oxford University by “a bloke who showed him the door and the quickest way to the publishing world”. He has been a “farm-labourer, television repairman, hot-dog vendor, plasterer, aid worker, performance poet, British author Jeffrey Archer’s ghost writer, and occasional liar”, according to the brief at the back of the book.

Mason has written five novels and a collection of stories. His work has appeared in ‘The Source’ and ‘West Coast’ magazines, on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio, and “numerous toilet walls”, in Britain.

Mason says he wanted to have his book published in Zimbabwe. But things are tight, most local publishing houses are feeling the pinch of the spiralling economy.

Instead, he headed for London where, having been turned down three times, he found Citron Press, whose patron is Martin Amis, a leading British author.

“There are tens of thousands of writers who feel permanently excluded from the world of mainstream publishing. Citron Press gives them what the vanity presses have never even pretended to offer: an audience, a fair hearing and a chance to excel,” Amis says in a statement made available to IPS.

“We offer new hopes to writers of genuine talent who have failed to find a publisher, while giving readers a welcome chance to hear new, original voices,” he adds.

The book, which is hilarious and loaded with lots of sense of humour, touches a bit on superstitions, an unusual phenomenon among British writers, which can, perhaps, be traced back to Mason’s experience in Africa and South America.