BSFA Interviews: Eugen Bacon

1. Eugen, my research told me that your foray into sci-fi writing began with Twisted Tails: An Anthology to Surprise and Delight in 2006, while your first novel Claiming T-Mo was published almost 13 years later in 2019. Along that journey, and up until now, you have received various accolades and been praised for your comiplex stories with strong social commentary. My question is: why did you start writing at all, and is it the same reason you write now?

Haha! You’re a true sniffarazzi. Twisted Tails is an anthology in which one of my stories appeared. I’m astonished you did not unearth Twisted Tails II. Other than that, in my past life, I tried self-publishing, which I will never recommend anyone to do, unless they seriously understand all the quality assurance checks they need. I don’t count any of my early works as real publications and encourage anyone not to buy them! Amazon has refused to take them down, and some boutique publishers continue to collect whichever miniscule royalties without giving me a penny.

Claiming T-Mo and Writing Speculative Fiction are my real first books, both outcomes of a PhD. Claiming T-Mo was the creative artefact and Writing Speculative Fiction the de-scholarised exegesis packaged for a broader audience.

Why do I write? I write to connect with myself, with others and with the world around me.

‘I write to find reassurance, distraction, a response to a trigger or a curiosity, or to find a better question. I write to answer incipient questions that trouble my mind. I write to relieve some form of anxiety, the question of anxiety being an unanswerable question… since the object cause of anxiety, the shadow of [it], cannot be symbolised… I write because I must do so, exhilarating, detestable, painful though this might be. I write because it is my [joy], the paradoxical satisfaction that I derive from my symptom and the excesses of an enjoyment that is closer to pain than pleasure’. (Hecq 2008)

My reasons for writing echo the very words of Dominique Hecq, a scholar, who was, first, my PhD supervisor, now a mentor and a friend. In her article ‘Writing the Unconscious: Psychoanalysis for the Creative Writer’, she looks at the potential usefulness of psychoanalysis for the creative writer.

These are words that speak to me personally as I write. My writing has always been a curiosity, a question—at the end of which I may find an answer, or a different question.

2. I had the privilege of reading your latest book due to be published by Stars and Sabers in September: The Nga’phandileh Whisperer, a mythic Afrofuturist novella about family, guardianship, illness, healing, and the whispering presence of ancestors guiding survival in a futuristic-yet-traditional cosmos. What inspired this book, and what would you want readers to know about it beyond what they could read on the jacket?

I struggled in the past with my identity, trying to find myself. I was a mother, a scholar, an African, an Australian... When I started writing Black people stories, it felt like coming out. Claiming my identity as an African Australian felt like home. I am very comfortable in this space, in this skin, in this identity. I am also part of a collective of African writers and, together, we have created the Sauútiverse, an Afrocentric universe of five planets, two suns and two spirit moons. I’d written short stories in this world, the first one ‘Sina, the Child with no Echo’, published in our first anthology, Mothersound: A Sauútiverse Anthology.

I wanted to write a longer Sauútiverse story with a strong female protagonist, and found this in Chant’L—a young Guardian with an affinity to hive-minded beasts, unaware that she has more magic than she knows how to use. Hence The Nga’phandileh Whisperer.

The novella is a second-person ‘you’ narrative, addressing the protagonist. I am at home with this voice, a personal connection with the protagonist, seeing as they see, feeling as they feel, yet omniscient—knowing just a little more outside them. I’ve also experimented this voice with Serengotti, a migrant novel with elements of magical realism and superstition, and readers seem to get it. Serengotti is a playfulness with language and naming, derived from Serengetti National Park in Tanzania where I was born.

3. What do you think readers will be talking about most once they finish The Nga’phandileh Whisperer?

Honestly? I don’t try to predict the reader. If something in the book talks to them in some way, I am grateful.

4. You have a very specific writing style, which to me is lyrical, poetic, surreal, more about emotional resonance and cultural memory than straightforward linear storytelling. As a follow scientist, this is about as far from journal article writing as one could possibly get! Walk us through your writing process and how you keep the story coherent.

I am a very immersive writer and an immersive reader too. I feel the story, breathe the story, for days, weeks... during the writing, after the writing. Characters still talk to me, so intimately as if they’re right there in my living room, right there across the table, side by side and riding shotgun in my car. The sensual way ‘of being’, ‘of doing’, I guess, is my core writing process. I can’t write a story I don’t feel. The concept may begin as a skeleton—say, I want to write a story about a girl in the village. I connect with their name and with their village. I feel their yearning, and my quest begins, as I try to chart their path toward an answer or a different question.

5. You have been writing a long time. Which of your books would you say is your favourite and why?

Kill me already. I love all of them from—from Claiming T-Mo onwards, that is. I feel a special connection to all my short story collections, starting with The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories, Danged Black Thing, Chasing Whispers and A Place Between Waking and Forgetting—each individual story, however sombre, is a playful surprise. You never know what you get. Reading my short story collections is the best way to discover me.

6. Are you inspired by any other authors, past or present? If so, who and why?

Totally. Toni Morrison, the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize (1993) in literature, is my biggest mentor. The first book I read was her Pulitzer Prize winning Beloved, and I was enchanted with the beauty of her language, the longing in her characters. It was longing that touched me inside. I bought and read Tar Baby, Jazz, Sula, Song of Solomon… and I knew that I wanted to write like that. Morrison’s revolutionary and most defining literary act was writing for Black readers about Black people. She taught me to see myself in the text. This was the ilk of writer I wanted to become—one completely at home with her stories.

I also grew up reading Margaret Ogola (how and why stories: How the Zebra Got Her Stripes...), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Camara Laye, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe in literature, and they all touched me in some way.

7. You have another novelette called Novic coming out in September, I believe. Can you tell us about it?

Yes, I love this story! Novic is a novelette that’s connected to Claiming T-Mo. It’s a sequel that doesn’t need prior reading. You know how you’re fascinated with a character and wonder about their ‘before the story’? This was Novic for me—a Sayneth (made-up land) priest whose immortality I wanted to explore. In so doing, I guess I was also anatomising and interrogating death.

8. And the future? What is next for you? Can you tell us a little about your work in progress?

I have just delivered a major project, Black Dingo, a collection of African Australian short stories, out in October 2026 by Flame Tree Press and distributed by Hachette and Simon & Schuster. Also in 2026 are Muntu, a novella, and Crimson in Quietus, a Sauúti novel, where a scientist, not a detective, seeks to solve a serial killer’s crimes. In 2027 is another short story collection, The Rawness of You, in which half the stories are set in the Sauútiverse, including a number of originals.

You’d think I’ve earned a rest, but knowing me...

9. Just a fun question. If you could write another genre what would it be and why?

I’ve dabbled in erotica and bent genres with literary, crime, mystery, thriller... I’ve always adored alternate history cross genres—featuring past events ‘The Maji Maji Chronicle’, past dictators ‘De Turtle O’ Hades’—with Idi Amin getting his due... ‘Being Marcus’—with Brutus understanding the true cost of betraying Julius Caesar... These all feature in the short story collections I’ve mentioned.

I’d love to write a riveting space opera that’s as fun and playful and ludicrous as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, yet solemn in the subversive activism of the themes it explores.

10. You are based in Australia, but have connections with both Tanzania and the UK. Will you be at any events in either country—or any other—in the coming months?

I’d love to!

11. Finally, where can readers find out more about you?

Find me on my website eugenbacon.com, and—did you know I have a wiki/Eugen_Bacon page?