By CASEY NEILL
DANDENONG-RAISED author Philip Taffs has some words of wisdom for budding writers in his home town following the release of his first novel.
“If I can do it, you can do it,” he said.
“Writers can come from anywhere. Never, ever give up. Just keep going.”
Mr Taffs wanted to be a writer from the age of five. He completed an honours degree in English at Monash University before starting a career in advertising.
In 2003 he started what would be an 11-year writing process for psychological horror novel The Evil Inside after a visit to a New York hotel.
“It was a few doors down from the famous Dakota building where John Lennon was shot and where Roman Polanski filmed Rosemary’s Baby, which is one of the prime influences on the book,” he said.
“I re-wrote it about 10 times and I got rejected in Australia and America and the UK by about 70 different publishers.
“In desperation I decided to self-publish in 2012. I didn’t want to self-publish because I felt like it was copping out, it wasn’t the real deal.”
He approached a new batch of UK publishers following positive reviews and Quercus took him on in 2013.
“They published all the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo books in the UK,” he said.
The Evil Inside in now available in Europe, Spain, Portugal and Australia and has been pegged for a possible US release.
Mr Taffs lived in Dandenong until he was 17.
“I miss playing down the Dandenong Creek. I used to spend hours and hours playing down there,” he said.
He attended the now-defunct Greenslopes Primary School.
“We used to call it Pentridge Primary because many of my former classmates ended up in prison,” he laughed.
“It was a bit of a hard knocks school, there was lots of kids there from the Housing Commission.
“Getting to see how the other half live at an early age does make you more aware of society and gives you a broader perspective.”
Mr Taffs recently returned to his childhood stomping ground.
“I went to visit my grandmother in the hospital and I wanted to see the house where I was born, which was in Clow Street,” he said.
“It was one of a number of flats.
“I knocked on the door and this old guy opened the door in his PJs in the middle of the day.
“He invited me in. We started chatting and I said ‘what’s your name?’.”
The man said he was Louis – the same name as Mr Taff’s son.
He took a stroll around the suburb and noticed more of an African influence than when he was growing up.
“Cosmopolitism is really good. The more varied the number of tribes or different sorts of people, you can learn from each other and, hopefully, gain a bit of empathy for the way other people live,” he said.
