Second nights in the theatre are tougher than first performances: there is less anticipation around and a transient sense of anticlimax. As the Cape Town Book Fair faces its second bow in June, it carries those burdens as well as being laden with new and unfulfilled expectations. For South African publishers and writers, though, it constitutes the highlight of the year.
Wedged between the long-running Durban International Film Festival and the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, the book fair falls into the busiest part of the national cultural calendar, completing a triple whammy of cinema, literature and the performing arts in June and July. The success of the second book fair will need to be judged on different lines from the first, however. While avid readers and book lovers revelled in meeting authors, attending readings and signings, and shopping at a books emporium, the fair is more than an extended meet-greet-and-buy affair.
Its conceptual essence lies in being a partner of the Frankfurt Book Fair, where the publishing industry gathers to buy the rights to books from other territories.
There is no gainsaying the considerable public appeal of the Cape Town Book Fair but if it is to serve the South African publishing industry and local writers it needs to grow as a rights fair for the business and not as a books festival for the consumer. How part two evolves in the run-up to June will be telling, and of more than passing interest to South African writers yearning for new readers abroad.
Among writers assured of just such larger readerships are Ivan Vladislavic and Chris van Wyk. The former’s Portrait with Keys, published here by Umuzi, was published in the United Kingdom late last year and rapturously reviewed by Jan Morris in The Guardian. Van Wyk’s Shirley, Goodness and Mercy is set for a stage incarnation courtesy of Janice Honeyman in Cape Town, and publication by Picador, parent company of Picador Africa here, which first sent his book into the world.
Other rewards await South African writers. The slew of prizes available nationally is impressive, headed by the Alan Paton Prize for non-fiction and the Sunday Times Award for fiction, each worth R50Â 000 and both highlights of the Cape Town Book Fair. A change in rules for the fiction prize would seem to install Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat as frontrunner. Previously, books translated into English had to be published in the same year as the original to be eligible. With that falling away, Van Niekerk’s novel, translated from Afrikans into English by Michiel Heyns, bids fair for pole position. Imraan Coovadia’s Green-Eyed Thieves, Morabo Morojele’s How We Buried Puso and David Medalie’s The Shadow Follows are contenders too.
Now in its third year, The European Union Literary Award for novels by unpublished local writers offers R25Â 000, a trip to a literary festival in Europe and publication of the novel by Jacana Media.
Short stories are also richly endowed, with the BTA/Anglo Platinum Competition offering a R25Â 000 first prize and a total fund of R65Â 000 and some platinum jewellery for good measure. There is also the HSBC/Pen award, the best entries for which appear in a yearly anthology of short stories published by David Philip.
The University of Johannesburg will add to this potential haul with a R40Â 000 prize for the best literary work of 2006 and R10Â 000 for the best debut of last year. A new literary award, this will help considerably that being without whom there would be no publishers, books, festivals or fairs: the writer. It is a coup for a university to enter this particular arena of the local book world, and demonstrates the marketing nous that the erstwhile Rand Afrikaans University is deploying to establish its new identity and ethos as The University of Johannesburg.
Indeed, it’s fascinating to observe the rivalries between academic institutions in the creative writing sphere. The University of Cape Town has a head start in the field and has attained the status of a novel factory, many of its creative writing master’s graduates going on to become published novelists. Creative writing courses at undergraduate and post-graduate level now seem to abound, with the University of Pretoria reportedly set to join the field.
Fiction aside, arguably the year’s most eagerly awaited publishing event is non-fictional. Mark Gevisser’s biography of Thabo Mbeki is reportedly nearing completion and is sure to add to the rich corpus of South African political biography. Late last year saw three new books on Nelson Mandela and a couple on Oliver Tambo; 2007 is set to be the year in which the man who succeded them as ANC president will fall under the biographer’s keen gaze.
Darryl Accone is one of the judging panel for the European Union Literary Award, with convenor Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson and novelist Fred Khumalo