We are delighted to announce that Ivan Vladislavić – one of South Africa’s foremost writers of both literary fiction and non-fiction – has once again been longlisted for South Africa’s prestigious Sunday Times Literary Awards, with his latest work THE NEAR NORTH recognised among the nominees for this year’s non-fiction award.
The non-fiction award honours ‘the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power’ through their ‘compassion, elegance of writing, and intellectual and moral integrity’. Ivan’s book THE NEAR NORTH is a vivid account of life in Johannesburg in times of crisis. From the stony ridges of Langermann Kop in Kensington to the tree-lined avenues of Houghton, the book invites the reader to follow Ivan through the city’s streets, meeting its ghosts and journeying through time and (often circumscribed) space, finding meaning in the everyday and incidental. The book was first published by Picador Africa in March 2024; an extract from the book, ‘A Faceless Compass’ was published in the Yale Review and is available to read online.
Ivan is a previous winner of both the non-fiction and fiction awards – the only writer to have claimed both to date – having triumphed in non-fiction for his ‘ingenious love letter’ (Geoff Dyer) to Johannesburg PORTRAIT WITH KEYS (SA: Umuzi; UK: Portobello Books) in 2007, and in fiction with his ‘imaginatively wild’ (Neel Mukherjee) novel THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET (SA: Umuzi; UK: And Other Stories) in 2002.
Congratulations Ivan!
Photo: Minky Schlesinger
About Ivan Vladislavić
Ivan Vladislavić was born in Pretoria in 1957 and lives in Johannesburg. His books include the novels THE DISTANCE, THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET, THE EXPLODED VIEW and DOUBLE NEGATIVE, and the story collections 101 DETECTIVES and FLASHBACK HOTEL. In 2006, he published PORTRAIT WITH KEYS, a sequence of documentary texts on Johannesburg. He has edited books on architecture and art, and sometimes works with artists and photographers. TJ/DOUBLE NEGATIVE, a joint project with photographer David Goldblatt, received the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Award for best photography book.
His work has also won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the Alan Paton Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize and Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Department at Wits University.
Praise for THE NEAR NORTH
‘Some of the most moving prose ever written about this former mining town…What a chronicle of a city in perpetual crisis.’ – Jacob Dlamini (author of ASKARI)
‘Ivan Vladislavić’s hand, not unlike that of Marlene Dumas, is unshaking as it paints silent, slow and highly vivid, almost cinematic, lines on the canvas of our shared Johannesburg… A masterful form of reportage of life spent seeing… feeling.’ – Bongani Madondo
‘A bewitching meditation. A raw, literary, and heart-felt ode to life in Johannesburg.’ – Andrew Harding
‘An elegant, gentle, bitter-sweet ramble through the streets of Johannesburg with the incomparable Vladislavić.’ – Jonny Steinberg
‘Ivan is one of South Africa’s best writers… the book is filled with exquisitely observed observations of Johannesburg in all its different moods and the different way people experience the different streets of Johannesburg: absolutely exquisite writing.’ – John Maytham, CapeTalk
‘THE NEAR NORTH has the febrile, hallucinatory feel of JG Ballard’s earlier apocalyptic novels, but tempered and made gentle by a Proustian attention to the ordinary that manages to make the book both paean and threnody.’ – Chris Roper, Daily Maverick
‘Vladislavić's helpless addiction to the inexhaustible variety of the ordinary reality is what makes his books so extraordinary. THE NEAR NORTH is a delightful addition to a substantial output.’ – Michiel Heyns (translated from Afrikaans)
‘There is sadness, rage, confusion and humour in the author’s responses to things but they come together in a reassuring gentle wisdom, an acceptance of things as they are, even as he wishes they could be different. There has been no waning of the author’s observational powers, and no waxing of the author’s ego. It’s a beautiful book. A true thing.’ – Karin Schimke
Praise for Ivan Vladislavić
‘Ivan Vladislavić occupies a place all of his own in the South African literary landscape: a versatile stylist and formal innovator whose work is nevertheless firmly rooted in contemporary urban life.’ – J.M. Coetzee
‘Mysterious, lyrical and wickedly funny… Ivan Vladislavić is one of the most significant writers working in English today. Everyone should read him.’ – Katie Kitamura
‘In a country obsessed with social realism, Vladislavic has always tried to find less obvious ways to approach the world.’ – Damon Galgut
‘Vladislavić's narrative intelligence is nowhere more visible than in his way with language itself… We enter incidents in medias res – as though they were piano études – and exit them before we have overstayed our welcome.’ – Teju Cole
‘Nothing short of a great contemporary writer, he pushes at form and content to make something strangely new and profound.’ – Neel Mukherjee