Durban - based Aziz Hassim was a retired accountant. His debut novel The Lotus People won the 2001 Sanlam award for an unpublished novel and was short-listed for the 2004 Sunday Times Literary Award. Spanning the events and moods of over a century, The Lotus People served as a form of catharsis for Hassim. While he called the cleansing process his 'personal TRC', he also wished to record a past he is convinced has disappeared forever. Durban, and particularly the Casbah area, had a kind of 'romance' and bittersweet lifestyle during the fifties and sixties which, in spite of the apartheid laws (or because of them) lives on only in the minds of those who inhabited it at the time. The younger generations thought he was 'making up stories' when he told them about that area. 'I also like to say to myself that we, all of us, need to know where we come from before we can know where we are going. This effort was a small step in that direction.' Although he carried the novel within himself, it is not autobiographical by any means. Instead, he called it a product of the environment he lived in during those days. This book is now in its second printing. Hassim launched his next novel - the second in a trilogy - on July 21 2009, in Durban. He had recently self-published the story of Valliamma, the Tamil child martyr, and had nearly completed his third novel when he passed away in 2013.