Ivan Vladislavić talks about the writing process and The Near North with fellow writers Fiona Snyckers and Gail Schimmel.
The Near North has been reviewed by Michiel Heyns on Netwerk24, by Mphuthumi Ntabeni on LitNet and by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen on The Conversation.
Gerald Gaylard is a Professor of English at the University of the Witwatersrand. Author of After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical Realism (2006) and editor of Marginal Spaces: Reading Ivan Vladislavic (2011), he has published primarily in the area of postcolonial culture, literature and aesthetics. His new monograph, At Home with Ivan Vladislavic: An African Flaneur Greens the Postcolonial City, is the first comprehensive analysis of this writer's works.
In this extensive interview, Ivan Vladislavic discusses aspects of his work with Jane Poyner and Josh Jewell of Exeter University.
In a written exchange prompted by The Distance, Sisonke Msimang (Always Another Country, The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela) discussed the challenges of writing about the South African past, the depiction of violence, and other things. The interview appears in Wasafiri issue 107, which reflects on many aspects of crisis and recovery.
Dominic Jaeckle of Hotel magazine and Ivan Vladislavic discuss the value of metaphor, the wiles of the amateur archivist, the allure of moving pictures, and other things.
Peter Beilharz reviews The Distance in the next issue of Thesis Eleven. A prepublication version has appeared online.
Schlagabtausch, the German translation of The Distance, has been reviewed by Hubert Winkels in SZ. This is Vladislavic's first publication under the Wagenbach imprint. The translator is Thomas Brueckner.
Jeanne-Marie Jackson writes on The Distance for Africa is a Country.
In this wide-ranging interview, Jennifer Malec, editor of the JRB, asks Ivan Vladislavic some questions about his new novel The Distance and traces some threads through his earlier work.
Joan Hambidge has added a review of The Distance to her epic blog Woorde wat weeg.
Shaun de Waal and Ivan Vladislavic discuss The Distance.
Flashback Hotel, a compendium volume of Ivan Vladislavic's story collections Missing Persons and Propaganda by Monuments, will be published in the US by Archipelago on 16 April.
John Mateer, author of the sonnet sequence Joao (Giramondo, 2018), writes on Portrait with Keys. Mateer was born in South Africa and now lives in Australia.
Whether The Exploded View is a novel in four parts or a collection of four longish stories is a question akin to whether South Africa is a nation of peoples or a collection of nations. Jan Steyn writes on The Exploded View in the Quarterly Conversation, issue 50.
In "Villa Toscana," the first story in "The Exploded View," a startling collection by the South African writer Ivan Vladislavic, a statistician named Budlender has helped redraft questionnaires for the South African national census of 1996.
The Exploded View has been reviewed on roughghosts.
Matt Seidel writes on The Exploded View, recently published in the US by Archipelago.
Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski write on the work of Ivan Vladislavic for the journal Thesis Eleven.
The Archipelago edition of The Folly was launched in the US in 2015. This interview grew out of a public conversation between Ivan Vladislavic and novelist Katie Kitamura at the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn on 5 October.
German radio journalists Gaby Mayr and Guenter Beyer take a look at Johannesburg in conversation with some of the city's writers and artists. This feature was prepared for Deutschlandfunk.
Amanda Sarasien has reviewed 101 Detectives for The Literary Review. The book is published by And Other Stories internationally and Umuzi in South Africa.
Before composing my interview questions, I tried to collect Ivan Vladislavić’s published work into categories. The impulse, I think, is reasonable: establish a program of order that assists in covering ground, therefore wringing the most out of each question. Of course, I found similarities, symmetries, occasionally a recurring theme or common setting. But a shared place or subject alone isn’t enough to mark a sustained interest.
On 4 November, the Skrywers & Boeke programme on RSG broadcast a conversation between Corina van der Spoel and Ivan Vladislavic. This wide-ranging interview dealt with his recent book 101 Detectives, translation, editing and other things.
Nicholas Lezard sees The Folly as 'a playful-sinister examination of the potentially dangerous false realities of literature, and even of language itself'.
M.A. Orthofer reviews The Folly for The Complete Review.
Read Tobias Carroll's take on these new releases at Electric Literature.
Darryl Accone writes on Ivan Vladislavic's Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction.
Business Day reports on the Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction awarded to Ivan Vladislavic.
Do copy-editors of today still use the time-honoured signs: the confident slashes, "stets" and arrowheads, the fallen-down S that means transpose? Or is everything now done through the garish bubbles of MS Word track changes?
Ivan Vladislavic's writing has a particular bent for the specifics involved in being a South African. Details of language, place and character build up in his books like brick upon brick of some maniacal structure. The characters in his books are proofreaders, hardware store owners, statisticians, engineers and photographers who all experience the world around them in peculiar and unexpected ways.
A Labour of Moles appeared in the Cahiers Series (Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris & Sylph Editions) in 2011. Sarah Gerard has written a great piece on the series for Bomb magazine.
Apartheid has just ended and in Johannesburg, retired proof-reader Aubrey Tearle, who has spent his entire life proofreading telephone directories, finds his world disintegrating.
Over the past two decades Ivan Vladislavić's varied oeuvre has cemented his position as one of the most critically respected novelists currently at work in South Africa.
When Ivan Vladislavic’s The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories was released last year, the incandescent and entrancingly strange “lost story” collection received little attention in the United States, even though Vladislavic is internationally recognized as one of South Africa’s most significant living writers.
Just William's Luck
“During the apartheid era South African writers were focused to a large extent on politics and racism. Everything else was out-of-bounds."
Beautifully wrought, Double Negative is a clever and original piece of work, impressively structured and layered.
An incandescent South African novel that travels from apartheid to democracy.
A multilayered portrait of a photographer exposes the social fault lines in Johannesburg under and after apartheid.
Ivan Vladislavić is one of a handful of writers working in South Africa after apartheid whose work will still be read in fifty years. He is perhaps best known for his depictions of Johannesburg, his home city, which include the lauded Portrait with Keys (2006). He is the author of four novels – The Folly (1993), The Restless Supermarket (2001), The Exploded View (2004) and, most recently, Double Negative (2011).