Although I grew up in Worcester, a small South African town in the shadow of the Brandwacht mountains, that wasn't the real me. The real me was best friends with Petunia, the North American goose who left her gooseprints in deep snow; Scuffy, the tugboat, who bumped up against logs and loggers as he floated down an East Coast river; and Madeleine, the little girl who lived right near the amazing Eiffel Tower. The South African skies, the mountains, the endless varieties of indigenous plants - all these things were intensely present in my life as a child and also entirely absent from the world of my imagination, where I lived.

Most of the children I went to school with were Afrikaans, had blonde hair and shockingly blue eyes. I was Jewish, my black hair curled in every direction and my nose was long. It added another layer of not belonging. And then there was apartheid, which was invented and established while I was growing up. I knew it was wrong, my parents knew it was wrong, but that's where we lived, that's where we had a house with a brass plaque on the front wall which read - Dr. G.B. Landsman, M.B.Ch.B., M.R.C.P. (Edin.) That's where we had loquat trees, and guava trees, a silver tree and a kumquat tree. I was always passionate about leaving. When I was very young, I believed London, Paris and New York were on the other side of the Brandwacht mountains because that's where I wanted them to be. I got the idea of leaving from my mother, who took me to the public library on hot afternoons. The idea of staying came from my father, whose plaque remained affixed to the wall in front of the house until the day he died.

I switched hemispheres when I was 21. I had just finished my undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town. I wanted to see London and Paris and New York, finally. New York stole my soul. It was everything South Africa was not. There was no Nature to miss in the tangle of buildings and the experience of a thousand cultures rubbing up against each other. I went to Columbia University and graduated with an M.F.A. in screenwriting and directing. My writing career started with the writing of screenplays, under the eye of the late Frank Daniel, the best teacher I have ever had. That's where I began to think of writing about South Africa, the place I never read about as a child.

PUBLICATIONS
Novel: The Rowing Lesson, Soho Press, 2007. Foreign rights sold to Granta in the U.K., Kwela Books in South Africa
Awarded the 2009 Sunday Times Fiction Prize
Awarded the 2009 M-Net Literary Award for English fiction
Shortlisted for the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature
Shortlisted for the 2008 Harold U. Ribalow Prize
Novel: The Devil's Chimney, Soho Press, 1997
Nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, QPB's New Voices Award, M-Net Book Prize (South Africa)
Trade paperback reprint edition, Penguin, 1999. United Kingdom edition, Granta, 1998
Other foreign editions: Germany, South Africa, the Netherlands, Norway 
and Denmark
Excerpts from The Devil's Chimney published in The American Poetry Review, 1994, Bomb, 1997

ESSAYS, REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS
"Imprints" in the anthology, Touch: Stories of Contact, Zebra Press, 2009
"The Baby" in the anthology, An Uncertain Inheritance, Harper Collins, 2006
"White Knight" in the anthology, The Honeymoon's Over, Warner Books, 2007
Interview with Breyten Breytenbach, The Believer magazine, November 2006
"The Quagga", The Believer magazine, October 2005
"The Auk, Great and Little", The Believer magazine, March 2005
"What Writers are Reading", Poets and Writers magazine, January/February 2002
Review of Arthur Japin's novel, The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, The Washington Post, 2001  

SCREENPLAYS
Adaptation of The Devil's Chimney for Arena Pictures and Africa Media Entertainment, 1999-2001
Honest Arrogance, about the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, written with the help of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, 1985/6
Workshopped at the Sundance Institute's annual June Lab, 1987