Cue Music: Joe Vaz Interviews Diane Awerbuck

In the following interview, Diane Awerbuck speaks to Something Wicked‘s Joe Vaz about winning the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for her debut novel, Gardening at Night, and her decision to follow it with a short story collection, Cabin Fever.

Awerbuck says that “short stories feel truer, somehow”, as you can capture “these intense, illuminated moments” more accurately in the shorter form. However, she admits that her next book will be a novel.

You were one of the first South African writers to submit a short story to Something Wicked (back in 2006). I remember how blown away we were by “Entanglement”a (a reworked version of which is in Cabin Fever). Can you tell us a little about the origin of that story?

When I first wrote it, I had just been to the ossuary in Kotna Hora, as well as a pop-up Banksy exhibition in someone’s garage in London. The ossuary was as it appears in the story: thousands of skeletons dismembered and rearranged in this impeccably styled and often quite funny way. The monk who had begun the work clearly had a sense of humour – which you need when you deal with real death, the real ending of things (as opposed to Emo), the end of the world that turns out not to be as final as they said.

• Complete interview in Something Wicked

Book details

• Cabin Fever by Diane Awerbuck
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781415201114
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