DAMON GALGUT

'Arctic Summer,' as you might know, is the title of Forster's one unfinished novel.

Writing is very good for household tasks. Because you'd rather fix a dripping tap or paint an old wall - you'd rather do almost anything than sit and write. I have to reach a point of obsession in order to write, and so I find starting a book incredibly difficult.

For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise.

I think there's something very dark in the South African psyche. I think we live a lot of the time in a state of a very low-grade civil war; the levels of violence in South Africa are extremely high. In a way, the civil war that never happened is being played out in a covert way, so we live with a lot of very ugly things.

I wrote large chunks of 'The Impostor' and 'The Good Doctor' on a beach in Goa.

There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.

While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.

I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India.

I like to believe that if you pay close attention to the sentences as they unfold, they will draw you in rather than pushing you away.

Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.

South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.

Being gay myself, I'm naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women.

Perhaps cliche is nothing more than the weight of the past pinning down your mind. In this sense, imaginative freedom is a way of finding the future, though it isn't so easy to do.

Stationery gets me excited because it has an individual character, unlike computers, which may be convenient but are generic and bland.

It's expected of novels that they should explain the world and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that's not what I see around me. Often, events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis.

I go for long walks in Newlands Forest in Cape Town, and I go to the Turkish baths on Sunday mornings.

Unrequited affection is very painful for the lover, but it can have unexpected, creative consequences.

I've been wanting to write a book about what goes into creating a novel, and the story behind 'A Passage to India' is especially interesting.

Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.

I try to get going early, on the assumption that the way you begin your day is the way you continue. But certain books only want to be written at night, so there's no hard rule where work is concerned.

Yoga helps me with a composed and serene state of mind, which is good for writing.

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

Rian Malan was one of the first younger writers to perceive and write about a darkness in the South African psyche that goes deeper than mere politics. To some extent, that's my territory, too.

India I have visited a great many times, though there is a lot about it I will never understand.

I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.