Known for his music, South African Music Award-winning musician Nakhane Touré is changing tune with the release of his debut novel, 'Piggy Boy’s Blues'. The novel, which has been described as reading fragments of a recurring dream, centres on the disastrous consequences of a man’s return to his Eastern Cape home town of Alice. Touré’s work is poetic with sensuous prose. His style delighted publisher, Thabiso Mahlape, who has described him as an ‘all-round artist’.

An overarching theme of the book, Touré says, is its exploration of the spiritual lives of black people. “You can see it in the characters, whether they are good or bad.” There is also the normalisation of gay sex, which Touré achieves by “writing about it in the plainest language possible”.

Touré credits K Sello Duiker as “having opened up the gates for me to walk through”. He locates the three main protagonists of his book via a retelling of family trees. Able and deft, with an already recognisable voice, he admits to being “inspired by the episodic structure of the Bible, especially Genesis”.

About the author

Nakhane Touré is a multimedia artist born in Alice, a small town in the Eastern Cape. He was raised predominantly in Port Elizabeth and is now based in Johannesburg. After beginning his studies in literature at the University of Witwatersrand, he embarked on a music career, resulting in an album – Brave Confusion – which went on to win a South African Music Award for Best Alternative Album.