Novel writing, novel reading

NOVEL WRITING, NOVEL READING

Professor Imraan Coovadia, writer and academic, Creative Writing Programme, University of Cape Town

Monday 25–Friday 29 January < 10.00 am–12.00 pm < COURSE FEES R1 75; Staff and students R790

Maximum number of participants 20

This is a short course about writing (and reading) novels. We will practise in class, exchange our work, and discuss the suggested readings, which are all to do with the beginnings of novels. Participants are requested to read the first chapters of the books listed below. The texts will be discussed during each lecture in the order in which they are given below.

Recommended reading

Austen, J. Pride and Prejudice.

De Cervantes, M. Don Quixote. (The only good translation is by Edith Grossman.)

Ellison, R. Invisible Man.

Flaubert, G. 2023. Madame Bovary. (Good translations include Davis, Steegmuller, and de Man.)

Márquez, GG. One Hundred Years of Solitude.

TO BOOK: https://www.webtickets.co.za/v2/performance.aspx?itemid=1603271685

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.