The second Es’kia Mphahlele Postgraduate Colloquium and Arts Forum will be held on September 3 and 4 at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Special report
The event is a tribute to the renowned writer and intellectual and has been organised by the School of Literature and Language Studies and supported by the dean of humanities at Wits.
Imraan Coovadia will present the keynote address on Friday September 3 at 2pm. He teaches in the English department at the University of Cape Town and is the author of three novels, most recently High Low In-between, the winner of the Sunday Times award for fiction in 2010.
Coovadia will be at the M&G Literary Festival that runs from September 3 to 5 at 44 Stanley Avenue in Johannesburg.
The colloquium and the M&G festival, in association with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) and the Wits Writing Centre, will present a writers’ masterclass at the festival. Under the banner, ‘Difficult Writing: Writers respond to Murambi, The Book of Bones”, this takes place from 3pm to 4.30pm on Saturday September 4.
Writers in the masterclass, conducted by Senegalese author Boris Boubacar Diop, are Kgaogelo Lekota and Vuyo Seripe (both Caine Prize workshop participants); Ret’sepile Makamane (Charles Pick Fellow in Creative Writing, University of East Anglia); Dumisani Sibiya (author of Ngidedele Ngife — Let Me Die); and Allan Kolski Horwitz (author of Out of the Wreckage, Un/Common Ground).
The M&G festival also features a launch of Mphahlele’s letters, collected in Bury Me at the Marketplace by David Attwell and Chabani Manganyi (Wits University Press).
Attwell will discuss the book on Saturday September 4 from 10.30 am to 11.30am. At the colloquium 25 postgraduates from nine South African universities will present papers, with awards going to the three best. Twelve papers from last year’s colloquium have been selected for publication and are undergoing peer review for two special issues of local journals.
Each evening of the colloquium is dedicated to creative programmes consisting of readings, performances and screenings by emerging artists either in collaboration or conversation with prominent artists.
Father Christmas Doesn’t Come Here (director: Bheki Sibiya) 14 min; I am Saartjie Baartman (director: Nobunye Levin) 18 min; A Kind of Language (director: Phybia Dhlamini) 25 min.
The directors of Father Christmas Doesn’t Come Here and A Kind of Language will be in attendance. — M&G reporter
The colloquium and arts forum takes place at the Graduate Centre seminar room in the South West Engineering Building on the east campus of Wits University