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The joys and terrors of writing

15 December 2015 - Wits University

Ivan Vladislavić is a Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Department.

‘Listen here,’ he said. ‘The fugu fish is twenty-seven times more deadly than the green mamba. Incredible.’ … Bate was sitting on the bed reading a copy of the Reader’s Digest, which he’d carried away from his dentist’s waiting room the day before …

This is an excerpt from the opening of The Fugu-Eaters, one of the stories in Professor Ivan Vladislavić’s 2015 collection titled 101 Detectives.

A celebrated South ��һ�Թ��� author, he is also a Johannesburg writer through and through. He has called this city home ever since he moved here from Pretoria to study at Wits in the 1970s.

Vladislavić worked as a freelance editor and writer for nearly 30 years before taking up his Distinguished Professorship in the Creative Writing Department at Wits in February 2015.

In this position he is able to devote time to his writing, while he supervises creative writing Master’s students. During their two-year course, the students, many of them first-time writers, produce full-length works of fiction or non-fiction.

Vladislavić’s first short story collection Missing Persons was published in 1989. Since then he has published seven books of fiction and four books of non-fiction, and has compiled and edited four multi-author volumes. He has also been widely translated and published internationally.

He brings a rich diversity of knowledge and experience to Wits. “It is very satisfying for me to come back to this institution 40 years after I first enrolled here as a student,” he says.

“My position here allows me to work in a more concentrated way and I am also thoroughly enjoying my participation in the masters workshop. Writing your first piece of fiction can be daunting and the workshops offer a supportive system that speeds up the learning process as students are supervised by practised writers, editors and readers who can guide them in a focused way.”

Regarding his own writing, Vladislavić says: “I will only know what my next book is when I get there. One of the joys – and terrors – of writing fiction is that you discover what you are doing as you go along.”