Some ideas arrive fully formed. Others accumulate slowly, gathering weight over years until they become impossible to ignore. Simile Press is the second kind.
Founded by Johannesburg-based author and creative Gerhi Janse van Vuuren, Simile Press grew out of a lifelong relationship with stories and books — and a long-held conviction that there had to be a better way to bring them to readers.
The Person Behind the Press
Gerhi Janse van Vuuren writes novels that don’t stay in one lane. Each book is its own experiment — a new challenge, a different risk, a fresh approach to storytelling. That restlessness is built into Simile Press’s DNA.
His love of stories started early. The most exciting day of his childhood was discovering, as a library prefect in primary school, that he could check out as many books as he wanted. He went home with twenty.
He started writing young, but it took becoming a father to make him commit to the dream seriously. Even then, it was nearly twenty years of learning, false starts, and relentless revision before he finished his first complete novel. He knows, firsthand, what the long road of a writing life actually looks like.
Before writing full-time, Gerhi moved through creative worlds that now inform everything he publishes. An MA in Drama Studies — exploring the intersection of role-playing game mechanics and theatre. Two undergraduate degrees spanning psychology, sociology, and fine arts with a painting major. Years as a high school art teacher. A storyteller’s toolkit built from fine arts, drama, education, and human behaviour.
He lives in Gauteng with his wife, two sons, and two cats.
→ Gerhi Janse van Vuuren’s Author Website
The Name
A simile doesn’t replace one thing with another. It holds two things alongside each other — this is like that — and in that comparison, something new becomes visible.
That’s what we want publishing to be. Not a transaction. A relationship where a writer and a publisher bring what they each have, stand alongside one another, and together make a work more visible than either could alone.
Simile Press. Johannesburg. Built around stories worth telling.