Imraan Coovadia has won the 2010 University of Johannesburg Prize for his 'timeless' novel HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN, beating Mark Behr and Sally-Ann Murray to the award.  The R60,000 UJ Prize is awarded to the writer of the best original creative work in English in the previous calendar year. Jacob Dlamini won the debut prize for NATIVE NOSTALGIA. The prizes will be awarded at a ceremony in August. In more good news, the title has also been shortlisted for the SA Sunday Times Fiction Award alongside J. M. Coetzee, Zinaid Meeran, Kgebetli Moele and Sally-Ann Murray. HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN is sold to Random House's Umuzi imprint in South Africa, HarperCollins in India and Das Wunderhorn in Germany.

The 'elegant and emotive' HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN, has seen Imraan Coovadia's writing compared to V S Naipaul's by Isabel Hofmeyr of the South African Sunday Independent who said: 'Rather like a wittier Nuruddin Farah or a more politically sagacious V S Naipaul, HIGH LOW-INBETWEEN documents the shifting realities of a particular postcolonial middle class life in Durban.' Vikas Swarup, author of Q & A (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE), has described it as 'a wise book, full of provocative insights.'

HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN is Coovadia's third novel. It follows GREEN-EYED THIEVES, published by Umuzi in South Africa, which was shortlisted for the M-Net Literary Prize 2007, and was runner-up for the SA Sunday Times Fiction Award 2007. Described by Daniel Mendelsohn in New York Magazine as 'hilarious and ultimately poignant', GREEN-EYED THIEVES has been sold to Seagull Books (WEL excluding South Africa) and to Newton Compton (Italy). Coovadia's debut novel THE WEDDING was shortlisted for the 2003 SA Sunday Times Prize.

To read the Mail & Guardian SA's reviews of the 2010 UJ prize-winners click here

More praise for Imraan Coovadia:

'One of South Africa's most impressive voices.'
-- Margaret von Klemperer, The Witness

'Imraan Coovadia is turning into a national, or international, treasure as a novelist. Not only is he thoughtful and interesting, full of ideas, deeply pondered, but he also has a firm grip on his narrative style in this his complex but engaging third novel…HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN, comfortably situated in the plain and everyday, but also deliciously wry and sharp, will make its own place in the mind of the reader.'  
-- Jane Rosenthal, Mail and Guardian

'Imraan Coovadia has a unique and marvellously talented voice. HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN effortlessly extended my capacity to imagine the moral inner world of the kind of character I often wonder about.'
-- Antjie Krog, author of COUNTRY OF MY SKULL