As many of you know, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu won a Windham-Campbell award in 2022. It has been a whirlwind here ever since, so we can only imagine what it’s like for Siphiwe! We’re a tiny press with a tiny staff, but we have such an enormous love for our authors and their books, and the Windham-Campbell Prize recognizing one of those authors feels amazing. As part of her award tour, Siphiwe has been featured in the Yale Review‘s special Windham-Campbell issue and, most recently, just wrote a beautiful essay for the Windham-Campbell “Writer’s Notebook” series.
We couldn’t be prouder to publish Siphiwe’s gorgeous and innovative writing. Her award-winning novels The Theory of Flight and The History of Man are both out now, with the final book in her City of Kings Trilogy, The Quality of Mercy, out this fall. Below is an excerpt of her Writer’s Notebook piece where she discusses the inspiration for The Quality of Mercy.
I will always say this because it is true—my grandmother was a phenomenal storyteller. She could make any story come into Technicolor life: an oral fable passed down through the generations, an unexpectedly spectacular thing that one of her students had done, a past event that she retrieved from the vast treasure trove that was her memory. A few years before she died in 2014, she told me a story about a man who instantly fell so in love with a woman that he followed her all the way to her village where he was immediately set the task of solving a mystery in order to win her hand in marriage. This story was the genesis of what would become my third novel, The Quality of Mercy.
