Imraan Coovadia

Professor Imraan Coovadia is a writer and scholar who has been director of the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Creative Writing since 2011. His writing include a history of political poisoning in southern Africa, The Poisoners: on South Africa's Toxic Past (Umuzi, Random House, 2021), a study of non-violent thought, Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela (Oxford, 2020), a collection of essays, Transformations (2021), which won a South African Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and a number of novels, including A Spy in Time (2018), shortlisted for the Nommo and John W. Campbell Award, Tales of the Metric System (2014), winner of the prize of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The Institute for Taxi Poetry (2012), which won the M-Net Prize, and High Low In-between (2009), winner of the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and University of Johannesburg English Literary Award. He has also published a scholarly monograph, Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul (Palgrave, 2009).

Professor Coovadia, who holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Yale, has written for leading publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Independent, The Mail and Guardian, Times of India and Sunday Independent.

Professor Coovadia is a B-rated NRF researcher and a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.

Publications

2020:   Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela with Oxford University Press

2021:   The Poisoners: on South Africa's Toxic History with Random House