Portrait with Keys

Winner, Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize, and the University of Johannesburg Prize, 2007

Shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2008; and the Warwick Prize 2009


‘One of the most ingenious love letters – full of violence, fear, humour and cunning – ever addressed to a city. If Italo Calvino had grown up in Joburg and experienced both apartheid and its aftermath this is the kind of book he would have been proud to have written.’ – Geoff Dyer

‘This fascinating work of art lovingly evokes a city of decidedly unloving reputation… PORTRAIT WITH KEYS reminds me sometimes of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, sometimes of Joyce’s Dublin, and occasionally, believe it or not, of J.G. Link’s VENICE FOR PLEASURE: but it is really altogether one of a kind. [Always at the heart] is the figure of the author himself. He is an indefatigable Everyman, kindly and wisely meandering through Johannesburg’s perilous wilderness. And he leaves his readers, if they are anything like me, consoled by the feeling that art and goodness alike can be impervious to squalor.’ – Jan Morris, Guardian


‘[There is] the sense of elegy for the disappearing city of ‘old’ Johannesburg… but he is also willing to celebrate the new city emerging around him. That peculiar tension, between despair and delight, animates the city. Vladislavic unlocks it beautifully.’ – Colin Murphy, The Irish Times

In the wake of apartheid, the flotsam of the divided past flows over Johannesburg and settles, once the tides recede, around Ivan Vladislavic, who, patrolling his patch, surveys the changed cityscape and tries to convey for us the nature and significance of those changes. He roams over grassy mine-dumps, sifting memories, picking up the odd glittering item here and there, before everything of value gets razed or locked away behind one or other of the city's fortifications. For this is now a city of alarms, locks and security guards, a frontier place whose boundaries are perpetually contested, whose inhabitants are 'a tribe of turnkeys'. Vladislavic, this clerk of mementoes, stands still, watches and writes – and his astonishing city comes within our reach.


A classic from a writer who knows – and loves – his fractured, fractious city from the inside out, bearing comparison with Suketu Mehta's MAXIMUM CITY, Orhan Pamuk's ISTANBUL and Joseph Brodsky's WATERMARK.