“This is a very sad day for us,” said Rhodes University Masters creative writing programme supervisor Robert Berold. “It’s the day that we have to say goodbye to Eben Venter, a man who can turn everything he sees into text.”
“This is a very sad day for us,” said Rhodes University Masters creative writing programme supervisor Robert Berold. “It’s the day that we have to say goodbye to Eben Venter, a man who can turn everything he sees into text.”
Acclaimed author of nine novels, Venter spent the past three months as the Mellon Writer in Residence at Rhodes. His lecture on Tuesday evening at the National English Literary Museum’s Eastern Star Education Centre was his last presentation before jetting back to his home in Sydney, Australia.
For the majority of us who read books instead of write them, novelists in Venter's league astound us with the skill at which they appear to be able to construct plots and characters seemingly out of nothing. Inspiration does take a physical form for Venter, however – from photos to newspaper articles and objects he finds in his travels, he said. All these things find their way into his work.
“The photographs I draw my inspiration from help me as an archive,” Venter explained. “I grew up on a farm near Burgersdorp [Eastern Cape] which became a recurring theme in my work.”
Photographs of his childhood home helped him remember aspects of it, which he drew on for establishing settings in three of his novels.
Photos also help Venter reflect on past experiences, like the following surreal experience he described: “I was at a book signing at the VA Waterfront CNA when in walked Michael Jackson. Apparently it was his favourite shop in Cape Town.”
Elaborating on his meeting with the King of Pop, Venter said Jackson had a rather weak handshake – “the kind our father taught us not to do” – and a thin, weak voice.
“I wrote about his death in the italBeeld/ital later and used the photograph of the two of us as a reflective tool,” he said. “I now realise that there were two very different sides to the man. The photograph helped me come to terms with that.”
But photos are only one of his sources of inspiration. Venter even used an image off Google Street View to help him establish the setting for the home of one of his characters in /italWolf, Wolf/ital. “When it’s not possible to physically visit the area where you’ve envisaged your character to live, using Google Maps is a great way to picture a possible home, helping you pick up on details like a bougainvillea in the garden or a house made of asbestos.”
