AUTODEALER journalist and Pinetown resident, Gavin Foster, was recently presented with a spate of awards at the Toyota Financial Services SAGMJ Motoring Journalist of the Year awards.
He took home the top awards for three of the four categories he entered – Magazines (Motorsport), Magazines (Motorcycles) and Digital Media (Motorcycles) – along with a highly commended certificate for the fourth, Magazines (Motoring). He was also declared overall Motorcycle Journalist of the Year.
“I was especially pleased with the motorsport award and the motoring magazine entries’ highly commended certificate as those are both hotly contested categories,” said Gavin, who noted that his successes surprised him because he believed his work from last year was of a higher standard. “Winning two awards then was a surprise and this year came as a bigger shock.”
Gavin worked for Transnet for 20 years before taking voluntary retrenchment in 1993. The avid reader soon afterwards met Dave Mullany, then editor of Scope Magazine, who told him he needed an article about guns. “I wrote a four-part series and it grew legs, running for two years,” Gavin explained. “I got lucky!”
He then broadened his scope and started doing articles about drag racing and hot rods before drifting into normal motoring and anything else that caught his fancy. He believed that while you could teach anybody the rules of writing, doing it well was a skill that could only be acquired through reading.
“I still read for hours on end every day. It helps with my writing that I’m fascinated by and research a lot of topics, ranging from true crime to eccentrics to health issues to military history. Everyone has a story to tell, even if they don’t realise it themselves, and they’re very often noteworthy,” said the writer extraordinaire, who also pens humorous columns.
“I haven’t had a proper job in 23 years, but the great thing about freelancing is that you can cherry-pick the stories you want to do.” In 2008 he won a PICA Award, previously called Mondi Award, for a profile piece he wrote for Best Life magazine. “It was an intensely personal story about my daughter that nobody else was in a position to write, so it’s really hers,” he added.
Gavin has extensively researched notorious Pinetown serial killer, Peter Roy Barber, but his freelance magazine and newspaper work make it difficult to find time to write the book that’s bubbling away in his head. His lifelong passions include motorcycling, history and, of course, reading.
