Franschhoek Literary Festival

Press Release

The Franschhoek Literary Festival: Fourth Edition will hit the streets of this Winelands village starting on Friday 14 May, with another gathering of writers, editors, publishers, readers and assorted book fans who will be deep in various conversations – sometimes to applause and laughter, occasionally escalating to hot argument – until sunset on Sunday 16 May.

The FLF is a celebration of books and writers with the focus on promoting South African writing and reading. It is run largely by volunteers, well supported by the Franschhoek community.

The programme and the list of visiting writers have not yet been finalised, though we can disclose some of the overseas writers:

• From Japan: bestselling French author Muriel Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Gourmet Rhapsody), courtesy of the Alliance Francaise

• From Spain: John Carlin who wrote Playing the Enemy / Invictus, the book about Madiba’s involvement in our 1995 Rugby World Cup win that became the Clint Eastwood starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon

• From the UK: sponsored by the British Council: TV personality Tom Watt, Arsenal fanatic and author of The Beautiful Game, a book of soccer heroes with a joyous young South African player on the cover.

The starting lineup of South African authors include former FLF stars Ivan Vladislavić (Portrait With Keys, Flashback Hotel), Deon Meyer (Blood Safari, 13e Uur), John van de Ruit (the Spud books), Rian Malan (Resident Alien), Chris van Wyk (Shirley, Goodness & Mercy and the children’s Long Walk to Freedom), Niq Mhlongo (After Tears) and Imraan Coovadia (High Low In Between). This year we look forward to welcoming Jonathan Jansen (Knowledge in the Blood), Mandla Langa (The Lost Colours of the Chameleon), Jacob Dlamini (Native Nostalgia), Michiel Heyns (Bodies Politic), Véronique Tadjo (Queen Pokou), Ndumiso Ngcobo (Some of my Best Friends are White, Is it ‘Cos I’m Black?), Mark Behr (The Smell of Apples, Kings of Water), Pieter Haasbroek (Kruispunt), Aher Arop Bol (The Lost Boy) and Angela Makholwa (The 30th Candle). Of special interest will be Wessell Ebersohn, pioneer writer of SA thrillers who dropped out of sight for nearly twenty years and is now back with a new Yudel Gordon book, The October Killings.

As with FLF 2009, there will be a cookbook event on the morning of Friday 14 May with three Ms of local cuisine: Marlene van der Westhuizen (Sumptuous), Mark Dendy-Young (La Petite Ferme Cookbook) and Myrna Robins (Franschhoek Food).

The price of FLF tickets remains the same: R60 per event, with concessions for students. Regular festival participants know that the proceeds of ticket sales and donations go into the FLF Library Fund which puts books into schools and crèches, with the long-term goal of achieving a new library to serve all communities in our valley. In three years the FLF has raised over R415 000 for the Fund, attracted a full-stocked container children’s library and helped to organise school and prison writing workshops, an annual poetry competition, a spelling bee and many writer visits to local schools and the Groot Drakenstein prison.

‘The people shall read’ is our mantra, starting with children. Your enjoyment of FLF 2010 from 14 to 16 May will help us to work towards this essential objective.

Details will be up on our website soon – www.flf.co.za – with the programme due towards the end of February. Be advised to book early via Webtickets, specially for events in the smaller venues.

For accommodation bookings: www.franschhoek.org.za or email info@franschhoek.org.za

Ends

Book details

• Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery
  EAN: 9781933372952
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Image courtesy Times Union

Press release

The recent Franschhoek Literary Festival (FLF) saw ticket sales up by approximately 50%, and about 3 000 visitors despite the pouring rain.

And what a weekend it was! Howling wind and 100mm of rain, swiftly-running gutters, mud everywhere – aptly renamed “book weather”.

There were 42 events and 56 writers, poets and chair people. Over 3 400 tickets were sold, with approximately 1 000 more tickets sold than last year. A bevy of publishers watched, listened and held candlelit dinners. Journalists clamoured for media seats. Cameras flashed everywhere.

In three short years the FLF has grown into a respected celebration of books and writers with an international reputation. This is made possible by a large annual donation by the Delta Trust, the generosity of local guest house owners who give accommodation for the visiting writers, a huge amount of hard work by the FLF Committee, and a squad of willing volunteers over the weekend.
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We have a strange distructive urge to imagine how we would cope without the people, objects or experiences we love. Writers do this in their novels in order to prepare them for the real thing.

This is André Brink’s thought on the signigicance of killing off a character for a novelist.

Brink, Sindiwe Magona (Beauty’s Gift) and Justin Cartwright (The Song Before it is Sung) spoke to Shaun Johnson (The Native Commissioner) about the death of characters at a session entitled “Sending them off Gracefully” during the Franschhoek Literary Festival.

Brink said the ending of a book symbolises death, whether you kill off a character or not. “But a story also does not necessarily end when the text stops, and that is reassuring.”

Magona agreed with Brink. Her new novel is aobut a woman who dies of AIDS. “Her death is an ending, but if the book does the work I want it to do, it will be a beginning.”

Cartwright said he killed off characters without thinking in the past, but now that he is getting older, he also takes it more seriously. He said it was the work of a writer to scrutinise all aspects of life…even death.

“When someone else writes about your life, there will always be parts of the portrayal that you do not like.”

This is what Pippa Green, the author of Choice, Not Fate – the Life and Times of Trevor Manuel, said during the discussion entitled “The Lives of Others” at the Franschhoek Literary Festival. Green, Jeremy Gordin (Zuma) and Zubeida Jaffer (Love in the Time of Treason) spoke to Jenny Crwys-Williams about the precarious relationship between biographer and subject.

Green tried to gain Manuel’s trust by not misquoting him and by checking her facts. It was important for her to get his permission to write the book. She also conducted about 20 interviews with him saying that “without his voice the biography would have been flat.”

Gordin started to write Zuma’s biography without getting his permission. When next he saw Zuma, he told him about it. “I don’t think he was deliriously happy. He wants to write his own book and he is weary of journalists.” According to Gordin they now have a good relationship.

Jaffer started out as a friend of Ayesha Dawood, the subject of Love in the time of treason. She was instrumental in bringing Dawood back from exile and used to regularly visit her and her husband. “I had the opportunity to collect details over the years” said Jaffer. Although the couple was very conservative, they trusted Jaffer enough to open up to her and allow her to write their love story.

Here are my livetweets of Max du Preez’s conversation with Victor Dlamini
at the FLF – the festival’s final event, and a fitting conclusion to a splendid literary weekend – tagged #flf #max:
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Toby Mundy, Head of Atlantic Books UK, introduced Christopher Hope as the “temporary mayor of Franschhoek” for these few days because of his position as founding director of the FLF.

Hope identified two ways of looking at South African society evident in South African literature: The first he termed the Alan Paton path, a kind of pastoral view, the second, his view, that of a Grecian tragi-comedy. This is where satire in Hope’s work shows itself. Hope said that he often responds to what he finds appauling with “wild hilarity” – we see this particularly in his debut novel, Separate Development a satirical comment on contemporary South African society. Mundy responded with the truism, “you don’t slay your enemies with fine words, you slay them with laughter.” And the thing about truisms is that they’re usually true.

The chat on Zimbabwe between Alexandra Fuller, Petina Gappah and John Maytham was not without its awkward pauses – namely when Gappah challenged something that she perhaps felt was too lightly said by Fuller, or when the two disagreed over Morgan Tsvangirai’s entry into government with Robert Mugabe – but on the whole civility reigned and many of Zimbabwe’s lesser-seen facets were turned toward the light.

It was, in fact, a terrific discussion. Here are my livetweets, marked by #flf #zim for Twitter searchers:
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The childhood of Finuala Dowling, Vikas Swarup, and Diale Thlolwe played a big part in their becoming writers.

In conversation with Michele Magwood at the Franschhoek Literary Festival it immerged that Dowling had grown up in a house where clichés were forbidden. “‘Booooring’ would be the family cry,” Dowling said. She was also the seventh child and would only get five minutes to speak at the dinner table, so it had to be important and to the point.

Swarup’s grandfather inculcated a love for books in him, because he had an extensive home library including books by Camus and Kafka. There was also a lending library close to his home that charged per day. Swarup would bring the books back in four hours and ask for a discount.

Thlolwe’s parents were both teachers and he stayed next to the school in Alexandra township, so he learnt to read early on. Oral storytelling also inspires him. “People are still telling stories,” he said, “But we don’t listen anymore…probably because of i-pods.”

Those who entered the Franschhoek Church Hall this morning got to witness two human rights lawyers in conversation: Denis Davis, now a judge, and Peter Harris, author of In a Different Time: the inside story of the Delmas four.

Harris admitted that he was extremely apprehensive about In a Different Time which was unlike anything he had ever done before. He therefore structured it like a thriller, a parallel bomb-narrative runs through the text, out of the concern that people might find it boring and with the encouragement of his editor, the kriminologist Mike Nicols.

An anecdote followed about a trip to Exclusive Books where Harris approached a bookseller to find out how this book was doing; “Do you know whether this book is any good?” he asked. The reply he got was: “No one’s buying that book, I wouldn’t touch it if I was you.” Yet the popularity of In a Different Time would prove otherwise, given a bit of, well, time. Or perhaps Harris simply chose the wrong Exclusive Books.

Festival-goers gathered this morning to hear Lebo Mashile perform her poetry and talk to editor of New Contrast, Hugh Hodge, about her writing. Mashile began the session with a performance of “What Kind of Woman” to the nodding approval of the audience and a full house of applause.

Mashile, who has just turned 30, has spent roughly half of her life in America and the other half in South Africa. A primarily American education goes someway to explain why she writes in English. Yet Hodge’s questions centered around why so many black poets write in English rather than in their mother tongue. Mashile agreed with Hodge’s view of the hegemonic nature of the English language and shared worries about the survival of indigenous languages within its structure.