Anna Stroud, who graduated with distinction with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Pretoria (UP) in 2022, has just had the novel she wrote as part of the course published.

Who Looks Inside was published by Karavan Press, which has punted it as “unsettling, eerie and evocative”. Her moderators praised it as original and subtle in its portrayal of trauma. And Jennifer Malec, editor of The Johannesburg Review of Books, hailed it as a “poetic, atmospheric and haunting … exploration of family trauma, small town secrets and the decisions that seal our destinies”.

For her supervisor, Professor David Medalie, Director of the Unit for Creative Writing at UP, the praise comes as no surprise. Medalie hails her as a “gifted writer and scholar”; her first novel a “beautifully written work, complex and layered, yet so readable that one cannot put it down”.

For Stroud, it is the realisation of a dream.

She has always wanted to write a book, but feared not being good enough. She knew she had to write in a structured programme, or else she would never do it. And preferably in an academic setting, where there would be marks and objectives. The master's programme, she says, was the push she needed to start.

"My friend calls me a pliggie,” she explains, using the Afrikaans colloquial word for someone who is dutiful to a fault. To write that book, the task would have to be clear.

But first she had to find the right taskmaster. 

She approached several universities and chose UP for one simple reason: it was the most humane. After being told by others to “read the website” or to present laborious information as part of the application, Prof Medalie's personal approach stood out.

When she approached him with queries, he invited her for tea at his home. She took along a young adult fiction novel that she’d written but that had been gathering dust in a drawer, and a few other samples of her writing (she works as a freelance copywriter) – and her writing clinched it.

Little did she and Prof Medalie know, however, that the meeting would mark the end of in-person contact for some time. The COVID-19 pandemic struck, and the remainder of Stroud's degree consisted of email correspondence with her professor.

“I didn't quite get the University of Pretoria experience. I was never physically in the building, and I'm sad about that,” she says. “But Prof Medalie was very hands-on throughout the process and very supportive."

She "really loved" the editing process, too. "The first draft that I banged out in about two to three months is not the final product… [Prof Medalie] sent me a lot of good feedback, hectic feedback. He showed me my blind spots and I learned a lot out of that.”

The dissertation part of her master's, which accounts for one quarter of the 80% mark she attained, explores childhood trauma, the underlying theme of her novel, and resilience. Titled I speak as only half of myself, it focused on The Yearning by Mohale Mashigo, published by Pan Macmillan in 2016, which won the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for South African Writing in English.

And how did she select it? “I turned to the very academic Twitter before it was X. I just called on people and said: 'Please help me create a list of South African books published from 2017 to now [2020] about childhood trauma.’"

Wanting to understand how contemporary South Africans her age process trauma, she created a shortlist and chose The Yearning because it resonated.

Resilience has always interested her: How some children who grow up in difficult circumstances come out okay when others don't. That was the impetus for her novel, which centres on a woman trying to figure out "how to keep moving on, despite all the things in her head holding her back".  

The book that came out was not necessarily the one she planned, though. "I just started and then when lockdown happened, I started thinking a lot about the past… [A] lot of that haunted me and kept me writing."

The novel's title is taken from psychologist Carl Jung's comment: “Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”

As Stroud puts it: "For me it was a call to see things for what they are, not what I wish them to be – something the protagonist tries to do, [with] varying degrees of success."

But, she adds, "I'm more well-adjusted.''

That the novel parallels some of her own life experiences is immediately apparent. The setting draws on her travels to South Korea and her childhood in the Karoo. There is a homage to two of her great loves, coffee and baking; and notably, the librarian in the novel “is pretty much modelled” on ‘Oom Malan’ from the library where she grew up.

“He was very kind. A lot of my life habits, like reading paper books and listening to vinyl, all come from him, because he used to listen to classical music on this old gramophone in the library.”

She has dedicated Who Looks Inside to him. The simple inscription reads: “Thanks for all the books.”