It is a brave new world that the third edition of the Cape Town Book Fair, subtitled Words Create Worlds, encounters from June 14 to 17. Second books — as authors and readers know — can be painful affairs, but the fair successfully negotiated that challenge last year. It is independence that CTBF III is sampling this year, shorn now of its association with a Sunday national newspaper.
Freedom brings with it curious responsibilities. In the case of the fair, among those is the need to create a platform to which fair-goers gravitate. The Sunday Times stand served that centripetal function last year but has gone the way of that paper’s involvement with the event. In its place is the Literary Forum and it is pleasing to see Michelle Magwood, erstwhile longtime books editor of the Sunday Times, playing a leading role there, interviewing authors. Whether the fair’s organisers will have resolved the pressing problem of high noise levels in the forum area is moot.
Noise might not, in fact, bother fair-goers at all, but given my experience last year it’s tempting to advise first-time visitors to pop outside reguÂlarly for some quiet and fresher air. Continued exposure to the hustle and bustle in the main area is akin to being inside a claustrophobic, air-starved casino.
Those who attended the Franschhoek Literary Festival in mid-May would have experienced another ambience altogether: haute bourgeois thanks to its setting and the costs of getting to Franschhoek and eating and staying there. The fair casts its net more widely or would like to. While it is not as demotic as it claims or aims to be, neither is it a boutique books event.
Some of the fair’s aspirations might be gleaned from its programme cover image of a young female reader holding a voluminous red hardback book that has no title incised on either spine or front. The world of the book, and its words, are up to the reader to divine, create and savour.
Book-lovers and book-buyers (not always the same creatures) certainly have a bonanza at the fair. But there is also its serious side: publishers from all over the world seeking out new titles for their markets and territories. Twin-faced, the fair has not been as successful on its trade side as with the public.
As a celebration of South African writing — and how prolifically we are authoring and publishing — the fair works splendidly. Authors read their work, are interviewed, take part in panel discussions ranging from politics to crime fiction and meet and greet readers and fans.
Politics is high on the agenda of the forum and in events put on by publishers to promote their own titles.
Crime — or, more properly, crime fiction — is also the focus of many discussions and author appearances. The genre, growing hugely locally and globally, is illuminated by one of its masters, Ian Rankin.
The latest international success story for South African crime writers — following on trailblazers such as Deon Meyer, Margie Orford and Richard Kunzmann — is that of Michael Stanley, the debuting writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. Both born in South Africa and now retired professors — Sears is a mathematician whose speciality is geological remote sensing, and Trollip an educational psychologist — their debut novel, A Carrion Death, has been well received in the United States and United Kingdom. Sonzogno of Milan will publish it in Italian on October 15; French rights have been secured too.
Stanley’s protagonist, detective Kubu, overweight and Mozart-loving, has won plaudits from the Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly and, perhaps most auspiciously, The New York Times Book Review. The authors appear on Sunday June 15 at 2pm and given their billing — Step aside Precious Ramotswe, Botswana has a new cop on the beat! — a witty bunfight could be in the offing if Alexander McCall Smith were to put in an appearance.
Neither politics nor real-life crime deterred McCall Smith and fellow international super-star author Marina Lewycka from visiting. McCall Smith returns, having been the drawcard at the inaugural fair, joined by Lewycka, the worldwide best-selling author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.
As welcome is South African-born, now London-based, literary agent Isobel Dixon. One of the leading agents around, Dixon returns to her homeland in her other literary guise of poet.
Writers published and unpublished can look forward to the M-Net,Via Afrika and European Union Literary Awards, functions at which the worlds forged by their words are acknowledged and rewarded.
For the fair as a whole, it’s a new era and the motto that comes more to mind is “A luta continua”.