Interview with Niall Hurley

1.Tell us about yourself:

I’m a 28 year-old from Johannesburg. I pay the bills through copywriting and content creation; I work on short stories as often as I can; I blog when I’m feeling brave; and I write poetry when something (or someone) affects me enough. I was born in Benoni on Joburg’s East Rand, but then spent the first part of my childhood in Dublin (my father’s the Irish one) before coming back to South Africa for good. My poetry was previously unpublished (excepting my own blog) before BNAP 2016.

2.Tell us about the poetry scene in your country:

I think the South African poetry scene has been a rich and vibrant one historically, and I think that’s because it’s an incredibly emotive country. The stakes are always high, there’s a seemingly endless list of wrongs to right, we have big lows alongside incredible highs. It’s a bipolar country of extremes. Of course, there’s incredible natural beauty to write about too.

3.What influences your creativity?:

Everything. Great writing inspires me. And great writing could be in the form of a celebrated novel, or it could be a striking poem in a literary journal from an unknown author. But in terms of influence, I think everything we do – ever have done – and even everything we don’t do, influences our creativity.

4.How do you get around life and your creativity, how do you achieve balance between these, living and creativity?:

It’s not easy. I definitely don’t write in a creative sense, for myself, as much as I should. They tell me it’s like anything – you need to be disciplined. You need to set time aside every day to write. I should try that.

5.What do you think is lacking in writing, or poetry-making in the continent and how do you think we can solve this?:

I’m not in a position to say that anything is lacking in African writing. I do think it’s a lot harder to make a name for yourself as someone who identifies as an African writer though. We should probably celebrate our writers more.

6.Tell us something funny, mischievous, a little bit crazy that happened to you or that you did that you have kept as a secret

Well, it’s not mischievous but maybe relevant. When I was a little boy at primary school in Benoni, I’d often get selected to read my stories out loud at assembly. I was convinced it was because I was some kind of child-prodigy and that I was destined to be a writer. It was only years later I found out that the teachers only really chose my stories so often because I had a full-on Irish accent at the time and they thought it was “cute” to hear me speak.


7.If you were a poem, what type of form would you be in and why?:

A limerick, because I try not to take myself too seriously.


8. What type of sports are you into?:

Cricket is my first passion. Don’t talk to me about SA and semi-finals. I’m also a die-hard Liverpool FC fan.

9.Tell us about your poem(s) in BNAP:

I have one poem in BNAP 2016: Shelley Point. It’s about a certain spot in the small fishing village of St. Helena Bay on South Africa’s West Coast, about 2 hours north of Cape Town. My father always described it as a magical place where time doesn’t seem to work the way it’s supposed to. I wasn’t sure what he meant until I visited it myself. I had to write about it.