Local and international authors who attended the 2014 Open Book Festival in Cape Town have shared their reactions to the event on various platforms. In general the five-day literary feast seems to have been very, very good:
For a literary festival that has only been in existence for four years, Open Book punches way above its weight and has achieved significantly more than literary festivals that have been in existence for longer.
Geoff Dyer:
Thank you for a wonderful week in Cape Town. It was fun, stimulating, impeccably organised – and I’m SO glad I was part of it.
Ekow Duker:
It was my first time attending a literary festival and I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm and friendliness everywhere I went. It was a thrill to be on the same panel as authors whose work I’ve read and enjoyed, like Jonny Steinberg, Andrew Brown and Zakes Mda. The experience led me to ponder my own writing and made me appreciate this gift of words even more.
Raymond E Feist:
You could tell the people who were there loved it. They were just great, I really enjoyed it.
What I didn’t understand until I got here was the position of fantasy relative to the rest of the market, and the fact that here it’s still a bit of a ghetto. Whereas in the United States and Australia and Great Britain – especially since Harry Potter – the fantasy genre has been 10, 15, 20 years in the mainstream.
Rabih Alameddine:
The Open Book Festival was a lot of fun, loved it. Best thing was that the audience was always engaged.
Adam Stower:
It was a pleasure to be involved in the Open Book Festival and to have the opportunity to share the excitement and enthusiasm for books displayed by all the children I met during my events. It is clear how the love of reading is a passion that can be shared by all, both young and old, and the Open Book Festival is doing so much to make this joy available to all. Congratulations to everyone involved, and I wish the festival ever greater success in the years to come.
Mike Carey:
Open Book 2014 felt like a gigantic party in which writers and readers came together to celebrate the texts and the stories and the media they love. Across five days of brilliant programming, I immersed myself in writers I’d never come across, genres outside my comfort zone and conversations on a hundred topics with strangers who quickly became friends. It was a show well worth coming six thousand miles for.
Francesca Beard:
Thank you so much for including me in the fabulocity that is Open Book, I don’t know how you did it, but it was spectacularly ambitious and diverse and eclectic and genuinely inclusive of different literary genres and also, certainly for its scale, the most friendly and intimate and relaxed literature festival I’ve ever appeared at. You made me feel really welcomed and valued and I think you were like that with everyone, a miraculous gift of warmth and charm and smarts. It was a pleasure and a privilege, I am a life-long fan and will be telling anyone who will listen to get themselves to Cape Town in September for a visit.
CA Davids:
Thanks so much for all the hard work and careful thought that obviously went in to Open Book 2014. It is such an unique and important space that you create each year in Cape Town. Also, the fact that it attracted such diverse audiences, in a city that rarely manages to achieve this, made it rare and very special. Congratulations.
What these snippets of conversations, memories, and illumination make explicit is the often mercurial (a word I always associate with Jonny Steinberg) network of sharing that underlies the otherwise solitary endeavours of writers. And nowhere is it more visible than at events such as Open Book. For me, the festival laid bare the more or less obvious symbiotic relationships between local and international authors. Their influence on and their necessity for our craft should not be underestimated.
Books LIVE offered extensive coverage of the festival, from interviews to tweeting live from the events. Follow the link to see more:
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