📝 Karen Jennings’ Writing Routine

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Karen Jennings is a South African author, best-known for her novels Finding Soutbek (2013), and An Island, which was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.

The idea for Karen Jennings 2020 novel, An Island, came to her in a dream. She was working on her novel Upturned Earth at a writer’s residency in Denmark during 2015, around the same time when there was a lot of news about the Syrian refugee crisis.

One night as she was sleeping, she dreamt of an island with a lighthouse on it, with visions of an old, African man frowning and alone. “I sat up at once and said, ‘That’s my next book,’” she recalled in an interview with Text Publishing.

Jennings began working on the novel almost immediately after her dream. She was fortunate enough to receive a Miles Morland scholarship, a financial scholarship awarded to a number of African writers each year, and spent 12 months writing the story. She finished The Island in 2017 but struggled to find a publisher for a few years, until indie press Holland House came along and printed off a mere 500 copies in 2020.

“When I did finally get a small publisher in the UK and a small publisher in South Africa to co-publish, they couldn’t get anyone to review the book,” Jennings told The Guardian. “We couldn’t get people to write endorsement quotes, or blurbs.”

“I felt very ashamed of myself,” she continued. “Because my publishers had put a lot of faith and time and, obviously, money into it. And it’s not that I personally was expecting fame or fortune or anything, but I felt that I had disappointed them.”

But then on 1 August, The Island was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. The book that only received a print run of 500 copies was suddenly competing alongside established authors like Damon Galgut, Richard Powers, Maggie Shipstead, Kazuo Ishiguro and others.

With the Booker Prize nomination and her name placed alongside famed authors, Jennings’ publisher had to do another print run — this time it was over 5,000 copies — in addition to the novel’s international rights being sold to foreign publishers.

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