Radio and television personality Joanne Joseph’s first book was a work of non-fiction.
Drug Muled: Sixteen Years in a Thai Prison (2013) was followed by her highly acclaimed novel, Children of Sugarcane (2021).
The novel began as a family history — a book to honour Joanne’s great-grandmother. It is set against the backdrop of 19th-century India and the British-owned sugarcane plantations of South Africa, painting an intimate and wrenching picture of indenture.
When Joanne started the project, she had some information about her great-grandmother but no accurate descriptions of her. Beautifully documented academic accounts of indentured life allowed her to fictionalise the era through a woman’s perspective. She wrote the novel over nine years while holding down various day jobs.
“I devised the characters, and the stories jumped out from the textbooks and almost punched me in the stomach,” she says.
Joanne took vivid accounts of beatings and indignities and wove her characters around them.
“The characters came alive in my head. I could hear how they would have reacted to certain stimuli and catalytic situations. I knew Shanti was stubborn and unnecessarily obstinate. She let me know. I was gripped by it. My great-grandmother led me by the collar, demanding the story be told.”
Joanne writes for up to six hours at a stretch and then sometimes not for weeks.
“I spend a lot more time thinking. It may seem unproductive, but I am figuring out the plot and the structure in pictures before I write — a discipline I learnt working in television.”
