Alistair Morgan was born in Johannesburg in 1971. He is the first non-American to win the George Plimpton prize for fiction, and his story “Icebergs” has been shortlisted for the 2009 Caine prize. His debut novel, Sleeper’s Wake (Granta, £10.99), is forthcoming this August. “This story,” he told Prospect, “was sparked by two incidents. One was a news story about a man in Japan who discovered that a woman was secretly living in his apartment. He found her by setting up cameras after noticing his food was disappearing. The second was last year’s outbreak of violence in South Africa. Immigrants from neighbouring countries were attacked and killed after being accused of stealing local jobs.”
