Local author launches second book

Windhoekers gathered at The Book Den to celebrate the book launch of Marisa ‘Mel’ Kelly’s latest short stories collection, ‘The Limbo Circus & Other Shorts Stories’, last week.

The book was published last month by Modjaji Books under her pen name, MA Kelly, and follows nine short stories set across Namibia, Zambia, Ethiopia and Mozambique.

Kelly’s second book comes only three years after her first book, ‘A Bed on Bricks’, which was also published by the same publisher.

During the launch, Kelly told writer and avid reader Roxane Bayer that writing and editing her second book had been much smoother than her first, when she had little knowledge of fiction writing or crafting narrative dialogue.

“It was way smoother this time around. With my first book I did not know a thing about writing fiction and dialogue, but thanks goes to my editor, who was able to teach me a lot,” she said.

Kelly told The Namibian yesterday that her collection of short stories draws inspiration from travelling through southern Africa.

“It’s always critical to write about places that you have seen.

It’s about capturing the way people live and the character of the area in ways you just can’t get from googling it,” she said.

Kelly, who moved to Namibia in 1998 from England, where she is originally from, pivoted from working as an English language editor when work dried up and began writing stories that had been stuck in her head.

The author draws inspiration from working in the London Zoo and later as a veterinary nurse for her stories.

“I’m not a religious person but I love nature.

I have been lucky to see many places such as Zambia and a few international places. I have lived so many lives.”

‘The Limbo Circus’ includes nine short stories set across post-independence rural Namibia, a zoo in Zambia, a flight to Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa and on the coast of Mozambique, all places she has set foot in.

In one of the stories, Kelly writes about a security guard protecting an abandoned fish farm while harbouring painful secrets about wartime loyalties.

In another, a conversation with a seductive stranger on a flight to Addis Ababa becomes the turning point in the life of a young woman flailing between two cultures.

Kelly also manages a small-scale women’s upcycling project, Sew Good Namibia.

Her fiction has appeared on the Kalahari Review website and she has contributed regular opinion pieces to The Namibian.

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