Imraan coovadia biography

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I had watched the recording of the mission twice. It was my first assignment as a case officer. We were scheduled to arrive at 5.25 in Marrakech, 16 June of the year of our Lord 1955. We eavesdropped on an engineering company, the proprietor of which went by the name of Keswyn Muller. We would then produce a brief report on Muller to assist the consultants back home. I wasn’t used to watching myself on tape and was impressed by the aplomb with which I handled the arrangements in the field. I looked calm, cool, and untouched by the stress. For that I could thank in advance the senior officer, Simon Six. He gave me the space to prove myself. I was looking forward to the camaraderie Simon and I were going to develop. There were other advantages to working with him. I had never stayed in a hotel before and the two rooms he had selected in the Grand Marrakech were luxurious. If I felt any nervousness about being around fair-skinned men and women for the first time I was wise enough to keep it to myself.

Our buildings were strung along a forested lane be

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An interview with Imraan Coovadia

Imraan Coovadia: author of The Wedding and Green-Eyed Thieves.

1. When did you first start writing?
Around 1992.

2. What do you love most about writing?
Answering questionnaires. No, I guess, I like the fact that it’s permanent.

3. Tell us a little about when and where you write?
In the mornings, at a desk.

4. Do you edit as you go along, or write it all and then go back?
Edit-write-edit-throw away-edit-write. Weep, laugh, write. Hope.

5. What else do you do? Do you have a day job, and if so how do you juggle writing and work?
I teach at UCT, a lovely place, and I have a lovely office where I don’t write.

6. How does writing a second novel differ from writing a first? Do you feel pressure to put in elements you know critics liked, and leave out things they criticized?
It was so long between them. 1994 when I finished the first one, and 2003, 10 years later, when I started the second (published one anyway). I can’t say criticism has ever really helped me. Some of it is nice though.

7. Do you feel

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School of Languages & Literatures

Imraan Coovadia

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 publish