Imraan Coovadia (South Africa)

Imraan Coovadia is renowned for the sharpness, wittiness and insightfulness of his writing. In 2001, he published his debut novel, The Wedding, which was the runner-up in the Sunday Times Fiction Award, long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award, finalist for the first annual Connecticut Book Award, and short-listed for the Ama-Boeke Prize.

This much heralded debut was followed by the daring Green-Eyed Thieves (2006), a novel the Sunday Independent called “a larger-than-life comic tale of outstanding craftsmanship”.

In 2009, Coovadia published the non-fiction work, Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipul, which traces the ways in which problems of imaginative authority and authorship structure the fiction and non-fiction of Trinidad-born Indian author, V.S. Naipaul, and how these resonate in postcolonial literature.

High Low In-Between is Coovadia’s latest novel. This skillfully constructed and riveting story delves intimately into the sinister complications of the post-apartheid dispensation, exploring darker territories than Coovadia’s first two books.

Of the book Michiel Heyns, Sunday Independent, writes: “High Low In-between does not offer any answers to the many questions, both political and philosophical, that it raises, its value lies altogether in the compelling urgency with which it dramatizes its characters' quandaries. It is an angry novel, but its compassion outweighs its anger; it is a political novel, but its humanity is stronger than its political charge.”

Coovadia, who was born in Durban and who graduated from Harvard and Yale, currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Cape Town.

Bibliography

High Low In-between, Umuzi, 2009
Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipul, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
Green-Eyed Thieves, Random House-Umuzi, 2006
The Wedding, Picador USA and Pan Macmillan South Africa, 2001