So it’s nice to have to be drawn back into when I was first writing it. And now that many people have read the book, it has forced me to go back to my intentions with the book, why certain things happened and how I feel about things. I didn’t really think lots of people would read the book. It is interesting to come back now, have people ask questions and interact with the story in a different way. I had no idea what the story would become.

So, I started writing a story about a woman from Soweto (like me) living in Cape Town. When I started writing the book, I was working in advertising and I wasn’t very happy in advertising. How does it feel to come here to talk about trauma and healing at Open Book Festival? Part of your book “The Yearning” is set in Cape Town. Mohale is my mom’s maiden name and because she didn’t become the world famous actress she wanted to be, I thought if I did something that would get my name out there, I would include her maiden name. I’m also an author and my pen name is Mohale Mashigo. I am now also a person who builds libraries for schools and currently working on my first library for a school that I volunteer at. I was born in Soweto, to a storyteller and a reader and I used to write sweet valley high fan-fiction in high school. My government name is Kgomotso Carol Mashigo.

I found the truth about the light interesting through the lens of this book how being the only light in the dark can be too much to handle and with time it can burn you.We caught up with Mohale Mashigo, who is part of a number of panel discussions including “ My Creative Lives” and “Talking Feminism” at the Open Book Festival currently taking place in Cape Town. These include the emergence, the place and power of a woman, the battle with drugs and all other forms of intoxicants in communities, relationships and their complexities, the place of memory in belonging and displacement in our existence, the climate crisis and its effects on the planet and its beings, femicide, obsession with keeping up appearances, light and darkness, unemployment, abuse and love. There is a future that these twelve stories bring, yet even in that future the current questions we raise and problems we face are still an issue. You are everything.’ That is where she took my hand and walked with me through the paths of her world. In a note, where the author writes who this book is for, she says ‘…and for us, who never see ourselves in the stars but die in seas searching for them. Each part consists of four speculative stories. The book is divided into three parts, The Good, The Bad and The Colourful. ‘Intruders’ is a short story anthology made up of twelve stories.

Mohale mashigo the yearning