Litnet

"Our latest book, Road tripper Eastern Cape Karoo, is what you will not find on Google about the people, the lifestyles, the snippets of history and the best hang-outs for travellers in this magical region."

"I came from a walking and hiking family, so it’s a fairly natural activity for me. Walking gives you an interesting perspective into human time. I like its sense of scale and the activity’s meditativeness."

The 9th Jozi Book Fair takes place from 31 August to 3 September in Johannesburg. The theme is Women and literature.

"Kalim Rajab’s collection is a readable and even-handed account of Harry Oppenheimer as a reticent philosopher-capitalist, leading readers to view him within the limits and possibilities of his time, and to appreciate in hindsight the flawed nature of his legacy."

Schalk van der Merwe's On Record – Popular Afrikaans Music & Society, 1900–2017 was launched on Tuesday, 15 August in Stellenbosch.

"Annas has taken some pretty evident elements of the South African reality and mixed them into a breath-stopping brew: a wall, some 'intruders', a tinderbox socio-political milieu and a few overinflated egos that concern themselves almost exclusively with obsessively safeguarding the privilege contained within the wall."

"The story as a whole is set so far in the future, yet is so grounded in our connection to the primitive and natural world, that it conveys the same type of timeless appeal as Game of Thrones (although the latter’s genre is fantasy). For this reason, we can forgive the sometimes hackneyed feeling of the poems."

"... De Kock, it seems to me, gets much right in Losing the plot. His preoccupations seem all the more relevant as we try to untangle the dense web of corruption in South Africa, decipher the shifty nonsense emerging from the White House, hope to differentiate news from fake news, and find ways of living in a murky world in which states have become indistinguishable from criminal enterprises and politicians from racketeers."

"I came to this book interested in inter-/transgenerational trauma, as a South African, and read it as a case study of the Afrikaner as a particular case of such trauma. I left unconvinced, which is a pity." 

Following the enormous success of the collaboration between Poetica and #cocreateSA last year, #cocreatePOETICA will once again be part of the seventh Open Book Festival from 6 to 10 September 2017.

Comic Fest will take place on 9 September from 09:30 to 18:00 and on 10 September from 09:30 to 17:00 as part of the Open Book Festival 2017.

You are invited to the launch of The twinkling of an eye on 15 August in Cape Town. Author Sue Brown will be in conversation with Karina Szczurek.

“I think effective fiction writing stems from some personal disturbance ​that the author extrapolates into another very different imaginative scenario. This means that the emotional experience of the writing feels authentic, and that the author can explore her dilemmas outside the confines of her own life.”

You are invited to the launch of Delilah now trending on 19 August in Stellenbosch. Author Pamela Power will be in conversation with Karin Brynard.

"Manufacturing in Africa has suffered: firstly, during colonial times, when raw materials were exported, as beneficiation took place abroad; and secondly, today, as China does the same."

"As with several other cases of travellers rounding the Cape, Russian travellers saw it as a convenient stopover, although it became more than that – a place worthy of a visit."

"The Indian community of Kenya comes into strong focus in this recent novel, part family saga, part social analysis and part romance, set mainly in Nairobi and combining idealistic hope with some strongly satirical exposures of the city’s and the society’s ugly underbelly."

You are invited to the launch of Firepool in Cape Town, where author Hedley Twidle will be in conversation with Rebecca Davis.

The 2017 winners of the Sunday Times Literary Awards were announced on 24 June.

"Before answering, let’s clarify the thorny issue of racism first. And let’s be clear – white racism arrived with the arrival of all Europeans in southern Africa. It’s not something that suddenly surfaced in 1948! And it certainly is not something peculiar to southern Africa only!"