Shaida Kazie Ali is a freelance writer and educator who has taught at secondary and tertiary level. Her first novel, Not a Fairytale (Umuzi, 2010) has won the University of Johannesburg’s Debut Prize for Creative Writing 2011 and is shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. She lives in Cape Town.
WINTER or summer, the children and I read together in my bed. The toddler uses the melody of repetition and memory, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? (Bill Martin Jnr) and searches along with the Baby Blue Egg for his mother in I want my Mummy (Mij Kelly), simultaneously eyeing the books scattered on the bed for the possibility of a plot-driven Leaning Tower of Pisa. The pre-teen clutches Book Seven in a vampire series, by P C Cast and Kristin Cast.
Recently, I’ve been re-reading The Bed Book of Short Stories (Modjaji Books), a remarkable collection by southern African women. I’m also finishing up An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah, a Zimbabwean author. Her stories are funny, poignant, beautiful and distressing.
I particularly enjoyed the empty coffin burial of a politician and the story of a woman clinging to her unfaithful husband and the affluent lifestyle in In the Heart of the Golden Triangle.
Marina Warner’s The Mermaids in the Basement, is waiting to be read; stories around “familiar folklore, legends and everyday preoccupations”.