Ask Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu anything you’d like about her writing and her latest book, The Creation of Half-Broken People, until June 6th.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu to our BookBrowse discussion. Siphiwe is the author of the City of Kings trilogy: The Theory of Flight (2018); The History of Man (2020); and The Quality of Mercy (2022). Her latest novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People, was reviewed in our April 23, 2025 issue.
Please use this space to ask Siphiwe questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Siphiwe, thanks for being here! Please tell our group a little about yourself.
Hi Kim. Thank you for inviting me to be a part of this series. I am looking forward to the discussion with the BookBrowsers.
A little about myself… I was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and that is where the series of novels that I write is set. One of Bulawayo’s many nicknames is the City of Kings. If you read The Creation of Half-Broken People you’ll learn why. After having lived in North America for 18 years I moved back to southern Africa and eventually to the City of Kings, where I currently live. I find a special kind of joy in writing about a place I love so much.
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I’d love to know more about The Creation of Half-Broken People. The story often references H. Rider Haggard’s novel, King Solomon’s Mines. What inspired you to use that book as your starting point?
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The Creation of Half-Broken People is different from your other novels in that it has a gothic framework. What led you to choose to write in that genre? Do you make a conscious effort to vary the genre from book to book? (I’ve read Quality of Mercy and that was part detective novel, which is why I ask…).
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I loved the “Easter eggs” in The Creation of Half-Broken People, such as the appearance of Isabella Van Wagenen, who most of us know as Sojourner Truth, and the murderess Daisy Hancorn-Smith, among others. What inspired you to include these little-known historical figures?
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What was the process you used to research the history behind The Creation of Half-Broken People? Did you uncover anything surprising? Has the process changed over the course of your writing?
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I am glad you enjoyed finding the ‘Easter eggs’ in the novel, I definitely had a lot of fun hiding them throughout the story.
I would not call Sojourner Truth a ‘little-known historical figure’, but I think what is not well known is that she had a very intriguing life before she became Sojourner Truth. For many years, I knew of Sojourner Truth (born Isabella Baumfree) the anti-abolitionist feminist, but I had no idea that she, as Isabella Van Wagenen, had been involved in a religious cult. In 2022, while writing The Creation of Half-Broken People, I came across this story of Isabella Van Wagenen written by Matthew Wills in JSTOR Daily. The reasons why this episode in Truth’s life is one that is often elided (to the point of near erasure) are rather obvious. Since I was writing about the erasure of women’s histories, experiences, and contributions, Isabella Van Wagenen just seemed like a perfect fit for the novel.
The inclusion of Daisy Hancorn-Smith was for very different reasons. I love finding out about the famous and infamous people who have visited or lived in the City of Kings during the time period that I am writing about, and, if I can do so organically, I try to find ways to include them in the plot. Although born in the Cape Colony, Daisy Hancorn-Smith lived in the City of Kings for a while before returning to South Africa where she is purported to have murdered three people – her first husband, her second husband, and her son.
Agatha and Archibald Christie also make a brief appearance in the novel when they bump into a man wearing a brown suit while taking an afternoon stroll on one of the city’s avenues. The Christies visited the City of Kings in 1922 and it is from her experiences during that visit that Agatha Christie was inspired to write The Man in the Brown Suit.
It is fun for me as the author to add these ‘Easter eggs’ to my stories, and it is great to hear back from readers who have found them and were delighted with them. It is also important for me that readers get a sense of the time I am writing about. The early 20th century in settler colonies saw a lot of movement, change, and reinvention and having these famous and infamous real-life people enter the narrative at different points helps to illuminate and illustrate this point, I hope.
If it’s not too late to ask a question, I’m curious which of the characters in your novel you liked the best/liked the least. Did any of the characters represent you?
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Hi Jennie.
Thank you for your question.
This is a tricky one for me because my main aim when writing is to empathize with my characters and to (hopefully) have the readers empathize with them too. That is what I love so much about the arts, especially fiction – this ability to have us experience the world through someone else’s perspective and beyond our own lived reality.
Writing any character requires a lot of patience, dedication and time. You spend so much time with all of the characters – both the good and the bad – trying to make sure that you are being true and fair to them. The saint and the villain have to be written with the same amount of care. It is a labour of love.
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I started doing archival research in 2004 when I was a film student. I was looking mostly for images and archival footage to include in my MFA thesis film, The Inheritance. I walked into the National Archives building not knowing that I was just about to fall in love with old documents and images that captured the history of my country, albeit imperfectly or incompletely. I was forever changed.
Being in the archives is definitely one of my happy places, so I take every opportunity to spend time in them. Between 2004 and 2019, I periodically did archival research in Zimbabwe, the UK and the US. Although, initially, the research was for my PhD dissertation, in retrospect, these were my gathering years. I tend to gather widely, writing down or photocopying anything that interests me. As a result, I now have a treasure trove of all kinds of information about my country’s past.
Since I am deeply invested in the impact that the past has on the present, all four novels I have written have benefited from this archival research. However, I wanted this use of archival materials in my creative writing to be apparent in The Creation of Half-Broken People, for reasons I hope are clear when you read the novel. And so, I included some of the actual archival documents in the novel.
Did I uncover anything surprising while conducting archival research? Human beings will always surprise you and so there are always many amazing things you uncover in the archives, which is a huge part of the pleasure of archival research. One of my favorite things to come across in the archives is a woman doing something completely unexpected. The novel was, in many ways, inspired by such women.
Hey Siphiwe, thanks for stopping by! Who are some of your favorite authors and how do they influence your work, if at all?
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The Creation of Half-Broken People is different from your other novels in that it has a gothic framework. What led you to choose to write in that genre? Do you make a conscious effort to vary the genre from book to book? (I’ve read Quality of Mercy and that was part detective novel, which is why I ask…).
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Welcome Siphiwe, I am a fan of Gothic books, and I was just wondering since your book has that flavor, do you have any favorites in the Gothic genre?
Again, thanks for being here…I am only halfway done and I am hooked on your book!
Hi Nick. Thank you for the question.
There are a lot of writers whose work I greatly admire: Jane Austen, Lucille Clifton, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Zora Neale Hurston, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Yvonne Vera, Alice Walker, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (to name a few).
There are also literary works that have been (for a variety of reasons) very influential to my own understanding of my particular place in literature as a reader and a writer. The Creation of Half-Broken People is an intertextual novel that engages with some of these literary works, namely: King Solomon’s Mines, Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Beloved, Wide Sargasso Sea and “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Most of these works were instrumental touch stones along my journey towards becoming a feminist.
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Kim, thank you for another great question 
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Yes, I tend to write each novel in a different genre. The Theory of Flight is often categorized as magical realism, The History of Man is categorized as realist, The Quality of Mercy, as you mentioned, is categorized as detective novel and The Creation of Half-Broken People is categorized as gothic. Some categories I agree with more than others and the wonderful thing about literary fiction is that it contains multitudes, so as a writer you’re often engaging many different genres at once.
When I wrote The Theory of Flight and everyone seemed a little too eager to label me a writer of magical realism, I realised that, if I was not careful, I could very well find myself too neatly placed in a box that would make people read my work in very particular ways. I did not want that. Luckily, the characters I write didn’t want that either and so each book has presented me with its own unique genres and challenges. This has made my writing career one of constant discovery, which I greatly appreciate and enjoy.
I know you’ve also written, directed, and edited an award-winning movie, Graffiti, in 2003. What steered you away from movies to literature? Do you think you’ll go back to creating movies in the future?
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I’m glad you brought up King Solomon’s Mines. I find it fascinating that you chose to reference that book to such an extent in *The Creation of Half-Broken People." What inspired you to choose that novel as a jumping off point for your own? I love the way you took a racist book and flipped it on its head, reimagining Gagool, the woman Haggard vilified.
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