When Mary Watson relocated from her native South Africa to live in Galway with her Irish husband in late 2008, the timing could hardly have been worse. Ireland was entering a recession and the author had her first baby to look after. She had built a reputation in the literary world after winning the Caine Prize for African Writing, and working as an academic at the University of Cape Town, but now she was out on a limb.
“I found myself effectively unemployed,” she recalls. “I thought I would be able to teach part-time but nobody was hiring. The recession coloured everything grey. I found myself with no work and in shock. In hindsight, it was not a good idea to have a baby, move country, and give up my job all in one year. I was lost for a long time.”
The sense of dislocation was compounded when her mother died from cancer in South Africa in 2011. Watson began writing a story about a girl who has lost her mother.
“It came out of homesickness, that feeling of loss, and thinking I needed to do something to make myself feel at home here. I asked myself, ‘What can I write that I can only write in Ireland?’ The act of writing this book was really an act of grounding myself here, trying to make myself belong.”
The result is The Wren Hunt, a young adult (YA) adventure set in a contemporary yet mystical Ireland. Wren Day, in which masked people hunt a bird, which they then affix on top of a decorated pole, is an ancient Celtic ritual still celebrated on St Stephen’s Day. From her new home on the outskirts of Galway city, Watson studied other pagan traditions, such as solstices, Samhain and Brigid’s crosses, to create a modern-day fairy tale.
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She imagined two groups — augurs and judges — descended from magical druidic tradition, who find themselves at odds. “In my imagination, Druidism was once the norm, but as Christianity came in they were forced underground. They had to keep themselves a secret and learn to function outside of society. The tensions between the groups have become explosive.”
Instead of a bird, the judges now hunt a girl: Wren, the story’s protagonist, an augur and a visionary seer whose mother abandoned her at a young age. In the book, the augur clan faces extinction so Wren must go undercover at a judge compound in Dublin to steal information that will save them. Throwing romance, magical visions and gruesome rituals into the pot, this is a thrilling and otherworldly depiction of Irish culture.
Watson’s immigrant experience informed the story and characters, she says. “It’s difficult when you live in a country that is not the culture you grew up with. For people who live this life, there is a feeling of always being excluded, of always being on the outside. I’m from South Africa, but I’m not living with the issues people face there. But then again, how much do I belong in Ireland? I don’t know. One of the advantages is you are looking in, straddling two different worlds, so you are maybe able to see things in ways people here cannot.”
The 42-year-old writer felt like an outsider in South Africa as well. She grew up with a “weird, constant identity conflict”, as part of what she describes as the coloured community: a term given to mixed-race people in the region. In the 1980s, Marike de Klerk, then wife of then President FW de Klerk, described coloured people as “leftovers” and “non-persons”. Inevitably, Watson felt abandoned by society as a child.
“I remember going to the beach in Durban and being forced to turn around and go back because there was a big sign saying ‘Whites Only’. Living with signs like that, knowing that prejudice structured your life . . . ” She trails off. “It is a very conflicted identity in South Africa. A lot of people claim being ‘coloured’ very happily and proudly. Many others reject it. The apartheid government would divide and conquer. The idea of coloured, black and Indian was a way of keeping them from banding together and realising this is not acceptable.”
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The author was attracted to ancient Irish tradition in part because she had none of her own to call upon. “During apartheid in South Africa, more emphasis and value was placed on white history and heritage than its black equivalents. I don’t know the stories of my ancestors — they are totally removed from me.”
Growing up in Diep River, a suburb of Cape Town, Watson imported her own myths and legends in the form of English literature. But there was also modern urban folklore: a lake and a caravan park near her home, supposedly too dangerous to visit. Watson heard stories of muti murders, in which people’s body parts would be sold for profit, and rumours of a man with long red fingernails driving the streets looking for children to abduct.
She grew up fascinated with magical realism. She studied creative writing under André Brink, an author who played a key role in an Afrikaans literary movement that challenged apartheid. Brink, who died in 2015, balanced reality and magic across his work. “One of his first comments to me was that imagination, especially when it’s wild and exploring new territory, needs to be contained and structured. Working with him, I learnt how to do that,” she says.
Watson’s time with Brink resulted in Moss, her 2004 short-story collection. Two years later, she won the Caine Prize for Jungfrau, a story from this collection. Before emigrating, Watson lectured in film in Cape Town. This experience informed her first novel, The Cutting Room, which was published by Penguin South Africa in 2013. It’s about a woman abandoned by her husband, who experiences an assault and then assists a film-maker making a documentary about a haunted house. “It wasn’t a carefully plotted thriller. It wasn’t Gone Girl by any means,” she admits. “It’s a strange book.”
She wanted plot, rather than ideas, to lead the narrative in The Wren Hunt. It’s her first foray into the YA market, tapping part of her academic life that she misses: teaching and interacting with young people. If the novel allows her to reconnect with her past, it also offers opportunities in the present.
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“There will always be a sense of being an outsider, of being different, not being born to this experience,” she says. “I still think of myself as South African, but also as Irish. This book is about the act of belonging. There’s a whole group of people who have moved to Ireland and don’t necessarily fit in here or anywhere else. Hopefully, by writing a different kind of Ireland, there’s a way for them to experience this place as home.
“I feel much more like I belong here nowadays. I love the landscape; I’m close to a lake. I look out of the window and it feels magical. As long as I am living here, I feel magic — and I’m going to keep writing about it.”
The Wren Hunt (Bloomsbury £7.99) by Mary Watson is released on Feb 8