Litnet

At the JM Coetzee | Athol Fugard Festival gala awards dinner recently, Darryl David  announced the winners in every category, and he also named each category after a  famous writer who deserved to be honoured. Read his report on the The South Africa Independent Publishers Awards 2015.

Mbulungeni Madiba of UCT in conversation with Gerda Odendaal and Marius Swart, Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, Stellenbosch University. The discussion centred on a chapter in Neville Alexander's book Thoughts on the New South Africa, problematising  the issue of language in the modern South African university. 

"This book is the work of a critic and scholar of commitment and mature wisdom."

"Mark Winkler’s command of the warp and weft of his  plot, his depiction of place, and his powerful and clear delineations of  character, both Nathan’s and the surrounding characters – all make for a strong  read."

"One of your core preoccupations is the ethics of reading, and in writing you an e-mail, this makes me think about what's at stake in the process, of you - so often the writer - becoming my reader; that is to say, this event of 'I-becoming-you'."

"And for all that the Franschhoek Literary Festival is irredeemably disengaged from the lived reality of much of South Africa ..."

David Attwell's new publication JM Coetzee and the Life of Writing was launched at Clark's Bookshop in Cape Town on Tuesday, 12 May. Finuala Dowling conducted the interview.

Here is the programme to this year's festival, which takes place from the 28th to the 30th of May 2015.

"One could say that this story is about a death in a family and how it  can be a tipping point, the nudge that will unravel the almost well-united  family. But in another breath  it’s correct to say that this is simply a story about lies and deceit, some of  those planned and plotted, and some just silly decisions or inaction."

"This lyrical, lucid and indeed spiritual meditation on our current condition seeks to challenge the hyper-individualism of our times by restating the centrality of community in cultivating the real self."

Karin  Schimke looks at who's who in the internationally flavoured programme at this  weekend's Franschhoek Literary Festival.

"Dust is a major novel – a complex text that takes on a huge topic: no less than nearly five decades of Kenya’s fraught history, linked to the experiences of a core of characters who are either members of, or whose stories are entangled with, an unusual family from the dry, far north of Kenya."