Nineveh
Page 22
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to my agent Isobel Dixon, and to publisher Frederik de Jager and all at Umuzi.
I’m especially indebted to Louis Greenberg, for his sensitive and insightful editing; Martha Evans, for her enormously helpful critique; Michiel Botha, for once again producing a compelling cover; Chérie Collins for the attractive page design and typesetting; Bronwyn McLennan and Bronwyn Leak for their careful proofreading; and Fourie Botha for keeping the whole show on the road. Particular thanks to Ivan Vladislavić for his help and encouragement. Thanks, too, to Diane Awerbuck, Karen Briner, Sarah Lotz, Eustacia Riley and Chris Wellbelove, for giving up their time to read the manuscript and give such excellent advice. And thanks, of course, to Olivia Rose-Innes for her sterling efforts at every stage of the game.
Over the last five years, various organisations have generously given me time and space to work on Nineveh. I’ve been very fortunate to enjoy the hospitality of the Akademie Schloss Solitude; the Caine Prize; the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, Georgetown University; the Karoo Boeke Trust, Hantam (Calvinia Boekehuis); the Caldera Arts Center, Oregon; and the University of Cape Town. The South African Horrorfest kindly let me test-drive Chapter One at the 2009 “Lounge of Horror”.
Thank you to Stephen Watson: deeply missed. Thanks also to Mervyn Sloman and all at the Book Lounge in Cape Town, and to Ben Williams and the bloggers at Books LIVE (http://book.co.za). And thanks to Greg Fried and Helen Scott for their heroic, but ultimately tragic, classical assistance.
I’m grateful to Pippa Parker of Struik Nature for the excellent Frogs & Frogging in South Africa and Complete Guide to the Frogs of Southern Africa by Vincent Carruthers and Louis du Preez, and Field Guide to Insects of South Africa by Mike Picker, Charles Griffiths and Alan Weaving. Any entomological or herpetological mistakes and fabrications are entirely my own.
On the epigraph page, the verses from Zephaniah are from the Authorised King James Bible. I have omitted the last line of verse 15.
Ningal’s words are from “The lament for Urim” (Ur), lines 275–285. Black, JA, Cunning-ham, G, Ebeling, J, Flückiger-Hawker, E, Robson, E, Taylor, J, and Zólyomi, G, The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/), Oxford 1998–2006. Darwin’s words are from a letter to John Lubbock, September 1854. Darwin Correspondence Project Database, www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-1585 (letter no. 1585; accessed 8 May 2011). Both the above online databases are wonderful resources.
Finally, special love and thanks, as ever, to Peter Colenso and to my family: Mother, Olivia, Andrew, Rebecca, Max and Benjamin; and to my late father.