[3] Coovadia spent his early years in Durban, attending Highbury Preparatory School where he was the School Dux and then the prestigious Hilton College (South Africa) before moving to the United States to study at Harvard College where he majored in Philosophy.
[4] He currently lectures at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and is the director of the Creative Writing program.
[5] Coovadia has travelled and lived widely, as extensively as, London, Melbourne, Boston, New York City, Durban and Cape Town.
[3] His early writing is considered an important addition to Indian-South African literature, in that it deals with the issues of migration[6], mobility, historical concerns[7], loss of culture and nationality[8].
As an academic at UCT, his research interests include: 18- and 19th-century English and American literature, philosophy and literature, political and social thought of the 18th and 19th centuries including Adam Smith, Hazlitt, Hume, Edmund Burke, and Swift, and contemporary fiction.
His debut novel, The Wedding, was shortlisted for the 2002 Sunday Times Fiction Award, Ama-Boeke Prize (2003), International Dublin Literary Award (2005), and was chosen as book of the week by Exclusive Books (South Africa) and Asian Week.com.
It is said to be inspired by novels like Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie, Tales of the Metric System explores a modern South Africa in segments, beginning during Apartheid up until the FIFA World Cup in 2010.
It is a science fiction tale featuring time travel and centres on the adventures of Enver Eleven, a black time-traveler from Johannesburg, the only existing city on Earth after the strike of a supernova.