"The Fear": Deeply personal and ultimately uplifting story by Peter Godwin
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Peter Godwin: I had returned to Zimbabwe on a journalistic assignment, to witness Mugabe's election loss (despite his efforts to rig them) but instead, he refused to stand down, and he effectively declared war on his own people. Foreign journalists were expelled and most of the opposition leaders went into hiding or exile as Mugabe launched a campaign of terror against his opponents, including torture on an industrial scale. It was the astonishing bravery and heroism of those he targeted inspired me to write this book.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
PG: I think I only realized that as I emerged on the other side of this book, the extent to which?I lost my distance from the stories I was trying to project. I found it quite traumatic living among them.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer??
PG: Well, I've worked as a trial lawyer and a soldier, a deck hand on a Mississippi tugboat, an orderly in a mental hospital, a university professor, and a documentary maker and a screenwriter. So anyone one of those!
JG: What else are you reading right now??
PG: I'm re-reading Nicholas Shakespeare's wonderful biography of Bruce Chatwin, while reading Chatwin's letters. I'm also reading Emin Pasha's Sudan diaries. And I've just finished a Graham Greene's A Burnt Out Case.
JG: What's next for you?
PG: I'm currently working on two screenplays; the first is a movie adaptation of my last book, "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun," the other is a horror movie set in Africa, on which I'm collaborating with the screenwriter David Schwab.
For more on "The Fear," visit the Hachette Book Group website.
