The Innocence of Roast Chicken defined me. It’s the book that transformed me into a writer. Yet, nothing could have prepared me for its reception when it first appeared. Its success knocked me sideways.

Somehow, it managed to hook into the zeitgeist of the time. And, I guess it must still have relevance today since it hasn’t disappeared into the void where old novels go to die. First published by Headline Review in London in 1996, it was rereleased in 2019 as part of the Picador Africa Heritage Classics collection, alongside works by Nelson Mandela, Ellen Kuzwayo and Frank Chikane.

In the week it was first released, the book shot to number one in South Africa, and remained there for fifteen weeks. It drew excellent reviews, and appeared as the ‘Dark Horse’ on a London bestseller list, alongside Graham Swift’s Last Orders and Hogfather by Terry Pratchett.

It was nominated for a prestigious international award and chosen as an ‘outstanding debut novel’ by a British bookshop chain. I launched in London, toured the UK, spoke in Europe, sold the film rights, and found myself recognised in the street — a strange sensation for someone who’d spent her twenties dogged by doubt.

The level of attention the book received gives some indication of the way it engaged the consciousness of general readers and intellectuals, both positively and negatively. It made people think. It caused a stir.

It wasn’t about me, though. In the late ‘90s, my book was part of a broader context, following our liberation from apartheid in 1994. Cabinet Minister Ronnie Kasrils noted, at the time, that Innocence ‘broke the paradigm’ and ‘helped to define the time’.

‘Your book,’ he said, ‘is what this country is all about.’

Perhaps it should not have come as a surprise. The decade before had resounded with calls for our artistic impulses to bow to the political. In 1987, JM Coetzee referred to a literature in bondage, unable to move beyond its preoccupations with power, to the ‘vast and complex human world that lies beyond them’.

Njabulo Ndebele drew attention to how little attempt there was to grapple with the minutiae of motive or social process. ‘People and situations are either very good or very bad.’

Our first free elections ushered in a new spirit and a new age. In this burst of artistic freedom, writers like myself, no longer constrained, shifted radically from prescriptive representations, in favour of a real attempt to describe flawed human lives.

It may well have been this attempt in Innocence that elicited such a response. This was a debut novel, for which I drew on little more than my instincts as a loving reader. Yet, somehow, it managed to tap into the mood of this new age.

Our nation had been through the worst of times, so perhaps the harshness of my protagonist Katie’s coming of age resonated with local readers. But, mostly, readers expressed to me their weariness with ‘struggle writing’ and its didactic intent. They were drawn to books that told them a story.

For writers, this meant we were able to glance backwards, acknowledge the past, but turn to the future, with hope.

So, this is not a novel ‘about’ apartheid and its immediate aftermath. It’s about ordinary people being tested by extraordinary times. And we are still being tested by extraordinary times.

Our innocence is constantly being pitted, in an unequal contest, against the universal forces of greed and venality. We continue to lose our innocence and fall into despondency.

This was a condition I intended to resonate through the novel – the swing in public sentiment between euphoria and hopelessness. It is my attempt at a plea for balance; the recognition that both extremes are unsustainable and only a degree of equilibrium allows us to live, ultimately, without despair.

The Innocence of Roast Chicken transformed my life from the ordinary – sometimes gloriously, sometimes absurdly. When I sold the film rights and was flown to Pinewood Studios in London, I was warned by the producers that a famous US actor was filming on set – under contractual instructions that no one who came across him was permitted to meet his eye. Ever the rebel, I announced that I’d do it anyway. (Who did he think he was?)

‘Then you’ll be wrestled to the ground by his body guards,’ I was told. Sadly, I never did encounter him, since I was dying to put it to the test.

It didn’t matter. My life, just then, needed no more animation than it already had.

Far more important than all this excitement was what it gave the young woman I was then, riven by insecurity. Pride. It gave me the courage to move forward with a literary and academic career, teach others to write, complete a PhD, and write more books.

That’s what the novel did for me personally. Since that handful of ‘new’ writers appeared in the early 1990s, the South African literary landscape has become full and diverse. Men, and women, of all colours, creeds and cultures produce narratives, personal and otherwise, in a wide range of genres. It has become a rich literary landscape.

To have contributed to this vibrant post-apartheid literary scene makes me more than proud. It has given my life meaning and worth.