My official picture from Reuters is just too cool for school

I love this photo. It has exactly that writerly air, serious, pensive that I fear I will never successfully convey. Here I look like I am contemplating great thoughts about the great books I will write one great day. This was taken in the Reuters building on Time Square in New York, I have been meaning to blog about my experiences on that day. Kush and I went along for an interview, he ended up playing catch with some of the producers and camera guys there, while I had a highly amusing encounter with a secuirity guard who wrote on my visitor's pass that I was "Schengener Staaten", visiting Reuters. Now the German speakers among you will know that Die Schengener Staaten are what English speakers call the Schengen States, so there is a great story there, which I will blog about soon.

So anyway, I came upon this photo quite by chance, a friend pointed me to a profile that Ben East put together for The National, a newspaper published in the United Arab Emirates, which carried this photo. It looked familiar, but I could not imagine whre it was from. I looked at the credit, and bingo, it was Reuters! And here it is, on Day Life. Nice.

I really like the profile that Ben East wrote, I truly recognised myself in his words, which was lovely. He also picked up on my insecurities without waving a red flag and drawing attention to them. This was a sensitive and thoughtful profile from someone who has read my book, and read it with intelligence. I especially liked his appreciation of what this book means to me, and how its success is something that I cannot separate from the success of my country. Here are his concluding paragraphs:

...[T]he rewards for Gappah are potentially huge – not just financially but in terms of how the deserved success of this first collection will thrust the spotlight on how life is in Zimbabwe. It is quite something for a new author who admits there was no initial coherent plan for An Elegy For Easterly. “I just wrote stories, one after the other, in part to test and stretch their writing,” she says with some bafflement at the praise they’re receiving. “So it’s difficult for me to talk about an intention behind the book. But if anything, my success is good news for a country sorely in need of it.” Zimbabwe might well be in need of such news. But the rest of the world is sorely in need of authors such as Gappah.

Thank you, Ben East.

Photo credit: Reuters.