Lisa Fugard's debut novel, Skinner's Drift, sees Eva van Rensburg (28) making a difficult return to South Africa in 1997 after 10 years in New York. There is a tie that runs deeper in Africa than it does anywhere else in the world - a connection to land, to roots, to home. Eva had vowed never to return to South Africa, a place of haunted memories and broken hearts, but her father is dying and she feels it is her duty. Her father is a violent man whose terrible secret Eva has kept since she was a child. After her rebellious and lonely English mother's death, unable to face life alone with her father on their debt-ravaged farm on the banks of the Limpopo River. Eva left. Now, she finds the new South Africa scarcely recognisable. As old wounds have barely begun to heal, she's given her mother's diaries and faces the secret that drove her far from home.
The inspiration for the book came from a 1995 article in the Weekly Mail and Guardian about a policeman at Pontdrif who was taking on the poachers in the Limpopo area, including his predecessor who was involved in the shooting of 23 hyena in the Limpopo riverbed. Lisa's research included a visit to Orania and a game reserve in the Limpopo area.
Lisa is the daughter of acclaimed South African playwright Athol Fugard and Sheila, also a writer. She was born in Port Elizabeth in 1961, where she attended a Catholic school. After one year at Rhodes University, she went to New York in 1980 with her parents and persuaded them to let her stay there, to study acting. She started writing seriously in her early 30s. Lisa has written travel and naturalist articles, with several pieces published in the New York Times. In 1997 she won the Robie Macauley Fellowship for short fiction. In addition to playing the lead role in the stage rendering of Lyssie, she has also acted in several of her father's plays. She lives in a small town in the Anza Borrego Desert in southern California with her husband and young son. Her parents live in Del Mar, near San Diego.
