Writing his dream

Writers from all over the world, including a retired businessman in Blythedale Beach, submitted their unpublished manuscripts for the annual, international 2015 Proverse Prize in Hong Kong in May last year.

Gustav Preller was all the more surprised when he was recently announced the winner of the competition, which is open to writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry provided the work is submitted in English.

Due to the high standard of writing, there were actually two winners this year, but to avoid confusion with the term “joint-winner” possibly meaning co-authors, they were each declared winners.

“All my life I have wanted to write, but you have to put bread on the table, so I held my urges in check,” said Preller, the grandson of the famous journalist and writer, Gustav Preller.

“I was on my way to start a journalism job in Joburg, following my grandfather’s footsteps, when I met a senior man from Unilever on a boat trip. We hit it off immediately and he suggested I come to his office.”

This visit started a successful, international career, mainly in the marketing field, which Preller thoroughly enjoyed.

When he approached retirement, Preller knew what he was going to do, but there was a hitch.

“I was afraid of computers. Adamant to overcome this fear, I bought a laptop. The laptop was as intimidating as the thought of writing. I drew the keyboard on a big piece of paper, and memorised it.”

His first novel was about banking fraud, but no one was interested.

“This was a big blow. It dawned on me there had to be a reason. I made a list of “my learnings”, which was an incredible learning curve for me.”

This was the beginning of three published books – all thrillers.

“Icarus over Hong Kong (2009) and The Twelfth Delegate (2011) were published by Pegasus in the UK and widely sold in South Africa and Last Train to Retreat (2013) was launched as a Kindle e-book.

“Thrillers, I find, are the least intimidating for a new author because it is action, rather than character driven. You can have multiple characters and it is written in the third person, past tense – a conventional narrative style for newspapers, which readers are familiar with.”

Interestingly, the manuscript that won the 2015 Proverse Prize was a writing experiment.

“I decided to push my writing to another level. I moved away from thrillers and went for a contemporary fiction genre, which is fiction based in reality. The narrative style is set in the first person, present tense, which was totally intimidating at first. The book is set mainly in KZN, with one chapter in Ballito.”

The title of the book cannot yet be reveled, as it will only be published by Proverse Publishing in November this year.

Until then, “the water man”, as he called himself, will continue doing what he loves – longboarding, fishing, mountain biking and of course, writing.

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