Lauren Liebenberg has gone from being the consummate hippie, travelling the world, to doing an MBA, becoming an investment banker and then moving on to being a successful full-time novelist. Not bad for someone who is not yet 40.

But then, as she says, in her teenage career dreams she was “destined for glory, in a number of spheres”. In fact, she has been searching for that one thing that she was going to be passionate about, because she realised that to do anything particularly well, she needed the passion. She believes she has found it in writing novels.

To date, Liebenberg has written a non-fiction financial book called The Electronic Financial Market of the Future, published in 2002; The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam, her debut novel that was nominated for the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in 2008; and her recently published book The West Rand Jive Cats Boxing Club.
“I have another one brewing at the moment, which should be out next year,” she says. Liebenberg’s first novel was based substantially on her childhood in Zimbabwe, as the eldest of three sisters in the 1970s. “Like many other amateurs, I did rummage around  my own sepia-tinged memories of childhood in writing my first novel,” she explains. “And many of the themes – from the cruel, fecund beauty and fragility of the African wilderness to the warped brutality of war – were all echoes from my own past, veiled behind a touch of whimsy.”

In 1984, her family moved to Johannesburg as her father worked in gold mining, so it was the best place for him to find work. “It would be a lie to pretend that he left to pursue better economic opportunities though; we joined the ‘chicken run’, because he and my mother perceived the government of newly independent Zimbabwe as another vampire state,” she says. In Johannesburg, she was sent to Brescia House School, a private Catholic school in Bryanston where, she says, she had a painful transition. “Overnight I was relegated to a dork – all the girls in Jo’burg shaved their legs and swore and knew who Yazoo was. I was nowhere. Of course, like all such humbling experiences, I am grateful for it in hindsight.” But as she finished school, she says: “Like most other teenagers, with the life experience of a gnat under my belt and confronted with my future, I frantically tried to discover the one thing that I would be passionate about (passion was compulsory) – and brilliant at – for the rest of my life.” But as no brilliant plan was immediately forthcoming, she did what her father wanted – a B.Com. And after completing her undergraduate degree in the early 1990s, she says, “I set forth on the obligatory backpacking trail overseas, which was mind-blowing for a girl fresh out the suburbs.”

In what Liebenberg refers to as her “hippie phase”, she says she “spent several years toiling away in the bowels of the clerical pool in a bank in London to fund my travels”. Around this time, she met the Englishman she was to import to South Africa and marry, now a bond trader for Citibank. Also, around this time, it dawned on her that her “Hollywoodised expectations” of her career were somewhat unrealistic. “My prospects began to horrify me,” she says. So, Liebenberg applied to Wits Business School to do an MBA. “I can’t remember what spin I put on it in my application form, but that’s what it came down to,” she recalls. “It might not be very noble or inspired, but fear produces much better students, I suspect.”

She describes her MBA as “a harrowing ordeal”. “I was relatively young (25) when I started and, in retrospect, I can appreciate why the average age – and preference – is considerably older, as I was probably rather immature. Whatever my excuse, I found it incredibly demanding.” And she adds, “The syndicate experience will haunt me for the rest of my days.” But, despite or in spite of that, she believes her MBA had a “profound impact” on her life. “It was both liberating and inspiring in many ways. It duly opened doors that would otherwise have been slammed in my face, but beyond that, it opened my mind to indulge a little pretentiousness, and I have always been grateful for that.”

On completing her MBA, Liebenberg was accepted into Rand Merchant Bank’s internship programme. “There really is something a bit sexy about boardrooms and deadlines, and I thrived on the adrenaline (and the caffeine and nicotine) for years,” she says. As an analyst at RMB, she wrote her first book, which she says she suspects opened a “latent desire to write”. But it was only when she fell pregnant in 2005 that she underwent another career change. She spent her maternity leave trying to make the switch to writing fiction.

“I don’t want to sound glib about it though – not only because I was breathtakingly naïve about the amount of ego-deflating rejection I would have to face to find a publisher for my first novel, but also because this account masks some of the more brutal truths for my motivation,” she explains. “To some degree, my defection from the corporate world encapsulates one of the failures of modern feminism. The harsh truth is that boardrooms are hostile places for mommies. While I never experienced any overt discrimination as a woman in investment banking – women can climb the corporate ladder as high as they want – discrimination does exist to the extent that the corporate environment still doesn’t accommodate women seeking to balance the demands of children – not that it accommodates men either, but it’s women who seem to be the bigger suckers for babies.“

While she was offered flexitime by her employer, she says: “I was only too well aware by then how much companies actually claim of their employees today. It’s less of a corporate culture than a corporate cult, replete with revival tent weekends, and I fled when it came to not just me, but my baby making the sacrifices. “Melodrama aside, you pay the price for flexitime at bonus time and downgrade from a career to a job, so I just didn’t see the point in ploughing on.” Although Liebenberg has long since accepted her decision, she is concerned about the price women pay. “Society as a whole pays a steep price for the mass desertion by women, who account for roughly 50% of university law and accounting and MBA graduates, but a fraction of company boards,” she says. “And I am not convinced that productivity at that level really is a function of hours of grind.”

“In my case, the truth is less that I jumped than was pushed, but who cares? I have discovered the great passion in my life,” she says. And now, following what she describes as the mostly “lonely vigil in front of a computer screen” as a full-time novelist, she has as much flexibility as she could possibly want to work around her two boys – William, six, and Russell, five. And although doing an MBA is not something one imagines a writer might need, Liebenberg says: “I believe I use the skills I honed in my MBA every single day in my writing. Research and analysis are key skills in writing historical fiction, and while I don’t doubt for a moment that I would have benefited from studying literature, nevertheless my MBA elevated my level of critical thinking to my lasting profit.” And Liebenberg admits she will never get used to getting bad reviews: “It’s like accidentally eavesdropping on a conversation about you in the smoking room where everyone agrees that you suck.”

But she revels in the fact that unlike in her “past life in the bank”, she gets to live a secret double life in a career that offers the “ultimate escapism”. Doesn’t sound half bad, does it?