Inspirations Novelist Andre Brink

The place

A deep and desolate valley known as "The Hell", lost in the forbidding "Swartberg" (Black Mountain) range between the Great and Little Karoo in South Africa. Well over a century ago a few intrepid pioneers settled there and developed a ferocious, closely-knit, patriarchal community which remained isolated from the outside world until a road was built into the valley a few decades ago. Now its magic has been spoilt, and most inhabitants have left. But from the moment I first set eyes on its austere beauty I just knew it was a setting for a novel; and the marvellous stories I was told by the last diehards, freely mixing reality and invention, the natural and the supernatural, all went into the making of my latest novel, Devil's Valley.

The play

I think I'll stick with Chekhov: the inimitable sadness suffused with mirth in The Seagull. Chekhov certainly wrote greater plays, but the emblematic figure of Nina, Treplev's delusions of grandeur, the bleakness of Trigorin's inner wasteland, glossed over by cynicism; the richness and subtlety of these figures remain to me a consummation devoutly to be wish'd.

The film

Burnt by the Sun, directed by Nikita Mikhalkov - that Russian sense of the earth, of the seasons, the way in which a large world of politics invades the most private and personal of lives - all of this confirmed for me so much of what I've lived through under apartheid and tried to write about; and the way in which the film transcends the here-and-now to expand our sense of what we mean when we talk about "the human" still leaves me breathless. The cameo of the father caressing his little daughter's foot while the machinations of betrayal and terror are building up around them is sublime.

The artwork

Any of Vermeer's tranquil interiors infused with the unutterable silence of human lives. Or Picasso's Guernica, which still sends shivers down my spine (which is where Nabokov located the organ with which we recognise art). That timeless shout against what violence does to the vulnerable and the weak and the beautiful.

The music

I always come back to Mozart or Beethoven. I cannot work without music. Whenever I'm really stuck, just staring at a blank screen, the only sure remedy is the Finale of the Eroica. Simply because it is so exultant, so unrestrained in its celebration. Once I've got that going, the block starts to give way; and soon I'll be typing to the furious rhythms of the music. And when it's over, when I need to give myself over to something soothing and larger than any here-and-now, it's the Adagio from the Ninth; or any of Mozart's Flute Sonatas. Which slowly, soothingly, allows new thoughts and scenes to germinate.

`Devil's Valley' is published by Secker

& Warburg at pounds 15.99