The Fugard Theatre serves as the hub for Cape Town’s only Book Festival this year. Running from tomorrow to Sunday, the festival is a celebration of all things literary.
With 150 events over five days at venues throughout the city, featuring readings from nearly 100 authors and 32 launches, the city will be awash with people talking books.
Three author suppers, five events where authors read from unpublished works and a Novel Sounds event (Saturday, 8pm) where Paul Harding, Damon Galgut, Henrietta Rose-Innes and Steven Galloway read from the latest novels, accompanied by music specially composed for the event, featuring Brydon Bolton (double bass), Mark Fransman (alto and bass clarinets) and Robert Jeffery (cello).
Then there’s the Writer Sports events such as Cringe Factor (tomorrow, 6pm) during which Sam Wilson, Tom Eaton and Justin Fox, among others, will have to write the worst possible opening page to a novel within a certain time, with the help of the audience.
Festival organiser Mervyn Sloman says the festival is designed around three elements: positioning South Africa as a world-class literary destination by bringing out international authors, promoting the best of South African writing and instilling a love of reading in Cape Town’s children.
As owner of the Book Lounge, he’s passionate about local authors: “We want to use the festival to put local writers into contact with international audiences.”
He points out that it is unrealistic to expect local publishers to bring international authors on an ad hoc basis, but an international book festival provides the perfect focus, plus a local city book festival could establish links with international book festivals to broaden exposure for local authors.
“You could either moan about it, or do so something,” says Sloman.
They’ll be taking authors to schools to introduce pupils to the concept of writers and in an effort to expand the reach of the festival, they’ll launch a mentoring project that will have 10 pupils working towards a printing project.
Daniel Gallow of the Fugard Theatre says they are thrilled to be the hub of the book festival because it brings a completely different audience to the theatre space. While he will stick close to his own venue, he admits that the festival has “too much choice” for anyone to think that it’s a simple question of
going to the first item on the list.
The festival starts at 10am tomorrow with author Alain Mabanckou (born in the Republic of Congo, considered one of the msot talented and prolific of contemporary French writers), author of African Psycho, Broken Glass and Memoirs of a Porcupine, discuss his work with Professor Jean-Louis Cornille (who holds the chair of Modern French Literature at UCT) at The Fugard Theatre.
The Fugard will host most of the talks like Bambi Kellerman (sister and worst nightmare of Evita Bezuidenhout) revealing all to Marianne Thamm at the launch of Never Too Naked, her gloves-off bra-down memoir, written with the assistance of Pieter-Dirk Uys (Thursday, noon).
Or you may want to go along to watch Lauren Beukes quiz Jane Bussmann about her Worst Date Ever (tomorrow, 2pm).
There’ll be book launches like Isobel Dixon launching her new poetry collection, The Tempest Prognosticator (Friday, 6pm), or Denis Hirson’s new Lemon Street (tomorrow, 10am).
For the kids there’s storytime with Sindiwe Magone at the Book Lounge (Saturday, 11am with a different narrator at 3pm) and a chance to meet Bokkie, the Springbok mascot, at the launch of a book about rugby, written for kids (Sunday, 10am).
lSome of the events are free, some are not, check http://openbookfestival.co.za for a detailed rundown of the programme of the biggest boekjol that Cape Town has seen to date.