I was born some forty years ago in Hwange, a coal ming town in south western Zimbabwe. I grew up in Bulawayo, the second largest city in Zimbabwe. Bulawayo is known for its rather sleepy, laid back nature and its graceful colonial era architecture, examples of which can be found on my website www.irenesabatini.com. I spent many hours in the fabulous Public Library, down in the basement of the children's section devouring everything from Enid Blyton to Shane by Jack Schaefer, one of my favourite books.

I left quiet Bulawayo for,'The Sunshine City', Harare, to attend university. Harare is all hustle and bustle, with some fantastic futuristic buildings.

After university I went to Colombia where I stayed for four years working as teacher and studying for my masters. One of my biggest thrills in Colombia was catching sight of the legendary Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Cartegena. "Here, in front of me, is a real, living writer," I remember thinking. "They exist!"

Soon after that, I started writing in a red notebook in this former monastery outside Bogota. The writing seemed to just spiral out of me and if I had to pick a time when I really started this journey it would be that wonderful quiet morning on a verandah so many years ago in the Colombian countryside.

HOW DID 'THE BOY NEXT DOOR -A NOVEL' START?

A phone call, sometime in early 2006. And the first line came some months later. Much changed in the story itself (draft after draft), but that first line has remained constant, true. The phone call was from Bulawayo. A fire had broken out next door to my parents’ house, the house of my childhood. Just that. A fire. And then, my first line — Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight — there it was: the story; the sum and whole of it, its core . . . from there springs Lindiwe’s story; without this line, her story would be another story, shaped by some other thing.

I wrote The Boy Next Door in Geneva, Switzerland and one of the biggest challenges for me was to capture the essence of life in Zimbabwe, particularly the second largest city, Bulawayo, in the eighties, which was a delicate period: optimism and hope (Zimbabwe was newly independent after a brutal war) and fear (the peace, at times, seemed fragile).

Music was what constantly brought Bulawayo during that period vividly alive for me. Mostly Johnny Clegg and Savuka with their song, 'Scatterlings.' That song had a visceral effect on me, the energy and vibrancy of its African beat surging through my body, sweeping away the years and landing me right there in that time. More so when I came upon the video on YouTube. It made me both sentimental and clear-eyed. And then there is the wrenching cry of the song 'Asimbonanga,' 'We have not seen him,' that captured for me the sorrows of that period when South Africa was still under apartheid and the southern part of Zimbabwe was suffering from a wave of killings.

The music grasped me at a profoundly emotional level; when the emotion subsided its echo was still there as I sat down and wrote Lindiwe and Ian's story.