Out of the Dead Lands

Cephus Twala is dying. During his final moments he foresees the arrival of a descendent of his, a man not yet born, January Twala. Helen Botes, one-time Apartheid apparatchik, cannot reach her son. During her anxious marshalling of a home bent on disrepair, she’s attacked by an intruder who wants only to suck on her finger. And Steven Moyo, environmental refugee and soft-hearted Red Ant, has resolved to seek out the strange squatter who claims to have walked from a fading future to save a neglected past. Out of the Dead Lands is a novel about remembering and forgetting. It’s a ghost story set in a Johannesburg out of kilter with itself. Those from the future and the past wander through the present, disconnected from their places in time, or forced (it seems) into asylum by a neglect that threatens their likelihood of ever properly existing.

Conrad Kemp is a writer and actor originally from Johannesburg, South Africa. He’s got a law and English literature degree from Stellenbosch, an acting diploma from the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, Ireland, and an MA in Creative Writing from Cape Town. He’s published a poem, a short story and some flash fiction in the UK and South Africa, written very occasionally for newspapers and academic journals, and more often for film and television, including the documentaries Chasing the Sun (2020) and the Emmy-nominated Two Sides (2023). He’s also written for theatre in Ireland, South Africa and Norway. He’s acted on the West End, London, and Broadway, New York, as well as at the world-renowned Market Theatre in Johannesburg. In film, he’s performed across from Forest Whitaker, Orlando Bloom, Toby Jones, Sienna Miller, Imelda Staunton, Viola Davis, and Sam Rockwell.