Imraan Coovadia wins the SA Sunday Times Fiction prize 2010
July 26, 2010
Imraan Coovadia has won the South African Sunday Times Prize for Fiction for his novel HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN, having been shortlisted twice before, and being named runner-up in 2007. JM Coetzee, Zinaid Meeran, Kgebetli Moele, and Sally-Ann Murray were shortlisted alongside him this year. Coovadia's novel, which also won the University of Johannesburg Prize, is now confirmed as the SA Lit read of 2009 and is also shortlisted for the M-Net Prize, which will be announced next weekend.
Tymon Smith, book editor at the SA Sunday Times said: 'The novel impressed the panel in its elegance and commitment to the exploration of middle-class Durban Indian communities and their struggles for identity and place, in an all too quickly shifting democratic era...The Fiction Prize winner should be a work of rare imagination and style, evocative, textured and a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark in contemporary fiction. HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN does just that.'
Please click here to find an excerpt of HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN.
Later this year the prestigious AGNI journal in the US will publish a major portfolio of African fiction, part of it appearing in print and part at AGNI Online.
Along with Henrietta Rose-Innes’ story HOMING (the title story of her collection), AGNI will also be running an extract from Imraan’s forthcoming novel
HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN was first published by Umuzi in South Africa in 2009. Rights have also been sold in Germany (Das Wunderhorn) and in India, where HarperCollins published earlier this year. N 1 Magazine in the US ran an extract in 2009.
Imraan's earlier novel GREEN EYED THIEVES, for which he was shortlisted before, was runner-up to Marlene van Niekerk's AGAAT that year. GREEN EYED THIEVES will be published internationally in English by Seagull Books in 2011.
Praise for Imraan Coovadia
'A wise book, full of provocative insights.'
-- Vikas Swarup, author of Q&A (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE)
'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
'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.'
-- Isabel Hofmeyr, Sunday Independent
'Though the underlying themes are indeed political and the unfolding crises of identity specific, the characters, in a riveting story, are superbly human…The story of denial, told in prose both elegant and emotive, is timeless. In Coovadia's Durban, engaging characters illuminate daily life where different worlds clash as they are juxtaposed.'
-- Joanne Hichens, Cape Times
Jane Rosenthal explores the complexity of the everyday in Imraan Coovadia's HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN: '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's HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN brings its intriguing dark whodunit plot to this year's top books.'
-- Maureen Isaacson, 'must-have, must-reads of 2009', Sunday Independent
'Imraan Coovadia has succeeded in writing a book that is both a gripping well-told and nuanced character study and a novel that deals with serious political issues...Coovadia's skill is to bring these issues to the fore as natural extensions of the concerns of his characters rather than through authorial, didactic intervention...through its change of tone and careful creation of a small but under-explored corner of South African society, [HIGH LOW IN-BETWEEN] manages to paint a beautifully layered and delicate picture of a world in which we have conveniently blinkered ourselves in the interests of self-preservation...Coovadia's gift as a novelist is not to let us forget this without telling us what to do about it and still satisfying our demands for a well told story about real people dealing with reality as we all must.'
-- Tymon Smith, Sunday Times profile of Imraan Coovadia