The award-winning poet and writer Prof Ken Barris has released his fifth novel- Life Underwater.

The fiction novel tells the story of the three Machabeus brothers - Jude, Simon and Eli, tracing their childhood year’s right up to adulthood.

Set in Port Elizabeth in the sixties, the novel focuses on the family dynamics rather than on the broad political framework, says Prof Barris.

The Language Coordinator for the Faculty of Engineering, Prof Barris, started the novel back in 2007 during a three week writer’s residency in Switzerland.

“I wrote a third of the novel during that time. It took three years to the write the rest,” he says.

With several collections of poetry and short stories also published, Prof Barris says his interest in people and curiosity of what makes them tick inspires his writing.

And there is no stopping Prof Barris, who is currently co-authoring a novel with award winning writer Mike Cope, which will be released at the end of this year.

To date this CPUT academic’s writing has earned him top accolades, including the M-Net Book Prize, the Ingrid Jonker Prize, the Thomas Pringle and the Vita Award. He has also been nominated and shortlisted for a number of other top literary prizes.

To purchase a copy of the novel go to your local bookstore.

By Candes Keating

Written by CPUT News
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Co-authoring a novel is not an easy task, but one that award-winning writers, Prof Ken Barris and Mike Cope managed to pull off.

The duo recently released the novel Sunderland, which has been described as “marvelously engineered.”

The novel tells the story of an unhappily married Cape Town academic, Art Berger, who is offered the opportunity to reconstitute the final papers of the great South African writer Charles de Villiers into the novel he was writing at the time of his death.

The novel alternates between sections, mostly in journal form, chronicling Art’s struggle to make sense of De Villiers’s fragmented notes.

Barris, who is the Language Coordinator in the Faculty of Engineering, was the voice of the writer Berger, while Cope wrote the fragments of the writer de Villiers.

“It was a very complex project and was technically very challenging,” says Barris.

“We had to negotiate a vision of where we wanted it to go.”

The duo agreed on a broad plot and then each chose a voice to represent. After two years of lots of juggling, Sunderland was launched early in May and has already enjoyed rave reviews.

Steven Boykey Sidley, the author of Imperfect Solo, Stepping Out and Entanglement, described the novel as “a startlingly original work: a novel within a journal within a novel, adorned with eloquent excursions into marriage, love, betrayal, academia, art, literature and a deep meditation about plot, character, narrative and the nature of story.”

The novel was published by Jacana Media Publishers and is available online and at leading bookstores.

Written by Candes Keating
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