Henrietta Rose-Innes
Agent: Isobel Dixon
Assistant: Finlay Charlesworth
Biography: Prize-winning author with degrees in archaeology and biology, and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. She has worked in publishing, scriptwriting and as a creative writing teacher. The author of two novels SHARK'S EGG (SA: Kwela 2000) and THE ROCK ALPHABET (SA: Kwela 2004) and a collection of short stories, HOMING, which features the 2008 Caine Prize winning story 'Poison' and the 2010 Willesden Prize runner-up, 'Falling'. In 2007/08 she spent some time working on her new fiction on the Schloss Solitude programme in Stuttgart, Germany. Her novel NINEVEH was published by Random House SA’s Umuzi imprint in 2011 and by Gallic Books in 2016, and her latest novel, GREEN LION, was published by Umuzi in 2015 and by Gallic Books in 2017.
‘Henrietta Rose-Innes writes an admirably taut clean prose.’ — J M Coetzee.
‘Rose-Innes’ writing is as entertaining as it is subtle – a rare combination.’ — Steven Amsterdam, author of WHAT THE FAMILY NEEDED.
‘I love Henrietta Rose-Innes’s work. With plotlines that are wittily subversive and language that is whippet-lean, it is long overdue for discovery by a wider readership.’ — Patrick Gale, author of NOTES FROM AN EXHIBITION
‘Rose-Innes writes with a dreamlike, lyrical beauty, but she has the ability to keep a tight hold on her plot. Each of her works is a finely wrought delight.’ – Jennifer Crocker, Cape Times
GREEN LION
Literary Fiction, 264 pages
Umuzi/Random House SA - May 2015
Aardvark Bureau UK August 2017
Con, adrift and emotionally numb, is drawn into a fascinating but disturbing new world when Mark, an old school friend, is mauled by a rare lion at the breeding park where he worked. Con steps into the role, becoming obsessed with the lioness, the only remaining Cape black-maned lion known to exist. A book about extinctions, and loss, and the impossibility of bringing things back from oblivion; and also about the mythic importance of animals in human lives.
NINEVEH
Literary fiction, 207 pages
Unnamed Press US/Aardvark Bureau UK Nov 2016
Umuzi / Random House SA - August 2011
Sunday Times Fiction Shortlist 2012
When Humane Pest Relocation Expert KD is hired to cleanse the vermin-invested Nineveh walled estate, her boundaries begin to crumble. Swamp water sweeps into Nineveh just as KD's past returns to her.
HOMING
Short story collection, 172 pages
Umuzi / Random House SA - July 1, 2010
In these stories, the urban landscape of Cape Town becomes a playground and an obstacle course, offering both menace and delight. Like the homing pigeons of the title story, the characters find new paths home and are transformed by the journeys. Includes the 2008 Caine Prize winning story ‘Poison’.
THE ROCK ALPHABET
Literary fiction, 191 pages
Kwela Books (SA) - January 9, 2004
An evocative novel exploring loss, memory and reclamation through the stories of Ivy and Flin, whose paths cross in Ivy’s quest for missing rock artefacts.