About Turbott Wolfe

Originally published by Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, in 1926, William Plomer’s South African masterpiece Turbott Wolfe was a hit sensation in both the UK and USA. In South Africa, the land of Plomer’s birth, it met with a different response. With its theme of interracial love, the book caused, as one commentator put it, ‘an intellectual riot’.

Written when Plomer was only nineteen, while he was living on a Zulu reserve in northern Natal, the novel retells the story of an eccentric Englishman who despises the racism he encounters in South Africa. Witty and satirical, Turbott Wolfe was considered by Virginia Woolf and Cyril Conolly to be one of the key novels of the Modernist period. Ian Fleming, Plomer’s friend and creator of James Bond, considered it one of the ten best books he’d ever read. The book’s themes of the complications of interracial love and the politics of Africa are still deeply relevant today.

About William Plomer

William Plomer was born in Pietersburg in 1903. He was educated at St John’s in Johannesburg and at Rugby school in the UK. After school, he ran a trading post with his father in Enthumeni, in northern Natal. While working there, he befriended both John Dube (the first president of the ANC) and the poet Roy Campbell. However, he left South Africa in his twenties.

As he suggested, he realised that his homosexuality and his anti-racist position would leave him, in South Africa, ‘in a state of tension that I should only find endurable if bent on martyrdom or at least victimisation.’ In the UK, Plomer became a celebrated, if somewhat reclusive, literary figure.