The Franschhoek Valley is known for a number of things — a monument to its founding Huguenots, the faux-French ambience inherent in the names of many of its restaurants, wine estates and hostelries, and some of the best food in the country.
Now, courtesy of a small group of local book lovers, spurred on by South African-born writer Christopher Hope, it will be remembered for a happily successful three-day-long celebration of the written word — to use Hope’s expression, “a literary street party”.
The inaugural Franschhoek Literary Festival brought together authors from home and abroad and enthusiastic hordes of readers in a dense programme of discussions, debates and readings that proved, if nothing else, that the book is very far from as dead as its detractors would have us believe.
And, if the organisers have their way, the festival, which they hope will become an annual event, will make sure that it continues to survive by encouraging a reading culture in the valley and contributing to setting up a state-of-the-art library accessible to the entire community.
In the months leading up to the event, the broad Franschhoek community was involved in the Voices From Our Valley poetry competition. A total of 300 high school and primary school children, adults and inmates of the Valley’s Drakenstein Prison, submitted poems in English, Afrikaans or isiXhosa and were judged by experts in each of the three languages.
The first event of the festival was workshops conducted by some of the participating authors at several schools and at the prison.
In the village itself audiences flocked to hear and interact with an eclectic and entertaining range of authors, journalists and poets. And then they discussed it all over drinks and food and they bought books by the hundreds.
They also proved that book lovers are people too, as they cheered the victories of the Sharks and the Bulls from the tables of pubs and cafés, and that writers are not all studious aesthetes, with the refined atmosphere at a couple of chefs’ tables shattered by some spectacular rows, notably one on the attitudes to expatriate South African authors (represented at the festival by Hope himself and Justin Cartwright).