Ivan Vladislavić was born in Pretoria in 1957 and lives in Johannesburg. His books include the novels The Folly, The Restless Supermarket, The Exploded View, The Distance 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, the English Academy’s Thomas Pringle Award, the Olive Schreiner Prize, the CNA Literary Award and Yale University’s Windham–Campbell Prize for fiction. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Department at Wits University.
Publications
Short Stories/Novellas
Missing Persons (David Philip Publishers, 1989)
Propaganda by Monuments (David Philip Publishers, 1996)
Flashback Hotel: Early Stories (Umuzi, 2010)
A Labour of Moles (designed by Ornan Rotem) (Centre for Writers & Translators, American University of Paris/Sylph Editions, 2011)
101 Detectives (Umuzi, 2015)
Essays
Willem Boshoff (David Krut Publishing, 2004)
Fiction/Essays
The Loss Library (Umuzi, 2012)
Exhibition
The Model Men (with Joachim Schönfeldt and Andries Walter Oliphant) (Wits Art Galleries, 2004)
Novels
The Folly (Umuzi, 2014 [1993]/Archipelago Books, 2015 [1993]/And Other Stories, 2015 [1993])
The Restless Supermarket (Umuzi, 2001/And Other Stories, 2014)
The Exploded View (Random House, 2004)
Portrait with Keys (Umuzi, 2006)
TJ & Double Negative (with David Goldblatt) (Contrasto, 2010/Umuzi 2010)
Double Negative (Umuzi, 2011/And Other Stories, 2013)
The Distance (Umuzi, 2019/Archipelago Books, 2020)
The Near North (Picador Africa, 2024)
Editor
Ten Years of Staffrider, 1978–1988 (with Andries Walter Oliphant) (Ravan Press, 1988)
blank_Architecture, apartheid and after (with Hilton Judin) (Netherlands Architecture Institute, 1998)
T’kama-Adamastor: Inventions of Africa in a South African Painting (University of the Witwatersrand, 2000)