Imraan Coovadia is a novelist, essayist, and director of the creative writing programme at the University of Cape Town. He is a graduate of Harvard College and has a doctorate from Yale in English. He is the author most recently of a novel, Tales of the Metric System, described by Publisher’s Weekly as “layered, multifaceted,” testament to the nuanced attention given to the personal lives of diverse South Africans living at various moments of change and transition from 1970 to the present. Indian Express praised the” fine observations and elegant language, the clever continuity and the unwavering structure which make this a compelling and essential novel.”
His previous books include The Institute for Taxi Poetry (2012), winner of the M-Net Prize, and a collection of essays, Transformations (2012) which won the South African Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction. In 2010 his novel High Low In-between won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and the University of Johannesburg prize. He has also published a scholarly monograph with Palgrave, Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul (2009), two earlier novels, and a number of journal articles and book reviews. His fiction has been published in a number of countries, and he has written for many newspapers, journals, and magazines, including the New York Times, N+1, Agni, The Times of India, and Threepenny Review.