The Open Book Festival 2022 returns to Cape Town, South Africa from March 26-27, 2022. It is sponsored by the South African Department of Arts and Culture and Heinrich Böll Stiftung.
The Open Book Festival, first hosted in 2011, is a literary festival held annually in Cape Town, South Africa with a focus on South African literature in an international context. The event has in the past included over 150 literary events, featuring over 100 authors over 5 days. It was initiated by Mervyn Sloman of Cape Town-based bookshop The Book Lounge and Ben Williams then of ‘Books Live’ now a literary-focused subsidiary of the South African newspaper Times Live.
For 2020 and 2021, the festival was hosted virtually because of a global pandemic that made physical meeting a very difficult affair at best. The first virtual edition returns as a smaller affair in the Southern African town this March. The first challenge was that the Fugard Theatre which had hosted proceedings for years closed down permanently on March 16, 2021. The new venue for the festival on its return will now be Bertha House in Mowbray.
This year, there will be no international guests at the event which was a deliberate decision on the organisers part. Those who attend the two-day event will see, among others, Sindiswa Busuku, Azille Coetzee, C. A. Davids, Relebone Rirhandzu eAfrika, Shana Fife, vangile gantsho, Pumla Gqola, Tapiwa Guzha, Faye Kabali Kagwa, Bongani Kona, Jessica Mbangeni, Thenjiwe Mswane, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, Sue Nyathi, and Julie Nxadi. You can find the whole list of guests by clicking here.
One reply on “Open Book Festival 2022 returns to Cape Town in March.”
[…] a two-year Covid-19 prompted break, the festival had a virtual mini-edition sponsored by the South African Department of Arts and Culture and Heinrich Böll Stiftung in […]