Spencer Rowley

About

Spencer Rowley was born in Rhodesia in 1958 and spent thirty-three years living and working in South Africa.

He has been, at various points, a soldier, a policeman, a husband and a father, an IT consultant, an artist, and a musician. He brings to his writing the attention of someone who has inhabited many different kinds of life and paid close attention to all of them.

His previous works include Waiting for John, an award-winning one-act play, and Sawubona, a novel. He currently lives in Nottingham, England.

Works

Novel

Sawubona

A novel set in Johannesburg about a homeless man, a street child, and a daughter who has learned not to look back. Sawubona is a Zulu greeting meaning I see you — an affirmation of the other person’s existence. The novel asks what it means to see and to be seen, in a city that does not always look.

One-Act Play

Waiting for John

An award-winning one-act play that captures the tension and quiet drama of lives held in suspension — waiting for a moment that may or may not arrive.

Coming Soon

Franki

A novel told in the raw first-person voice of a nineteen-year-old South African woman who has decided, on a Tuesday morning in Melville, that she is leaving. Where she is going and what she is running from are the questions the novel turns on.

Free Stories

Two standalone stories, free to download. Enter your email and the story is yours.

From the world of Sawubona

Sipho

Before Robert found him, Sipho had already lost everything.

His father. His mother. His home. At fourteen he walked out of his aunt’s house in Alexandra with a school satchel and nothing else, into the streets of Johannesburg. This is the story of how he survived — and of the friend who made it possible.

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A standalone story

Ten Hours

A Friday shift. A chippy in Nottingham. A voicemail she won’t play.

Robyn is twenty-five, South African, and a long way from home. She works the counter at a chip shop in the Lace Market, four in the afternoon till two in the morning, serving drunks and students and strangers, and trying not to think about the message on her phone.

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Visual Art

Spencer works primarily in oils, favouring the medium for its depth, forgiveness, and capacity to hold the warmth of natural light. Landscape is his abiding subject — the burnt ochre plains and towering skies of southern Africa, and now the softer, overcast greens of the English Midlands. He is drawn to the way light transforms land, and to the quiet tension between vastness and intimacy that landscape painting demands.

He paints other subjects from time to time — a face, a building, an interior — but returns always to the open ground. His paintings share with his writing a preoccupation with close looking: the conviction that the world, observed carefully enough, reveals more than enough beauty and strangeness to fill a lifetime’s work.

Painting 1

Painting 2

Painting 3

Painting 4

Painting 5

Painting 6