Litnet

"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.

"Every Monday morning she came walking up the dirt road from the black township, wearing her brightly coloured Basotho blanket around her shoulders and her orange-and-black headscarf."

"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."

"In the end I did what came naturally to me and that was honesty. I just wrote about what I was feeling and did what I felt I wanted to do ..."

What is the role of the media in the time of xenophobia?

Lou-Marié Kruger, psychologist, researcher and convenor of a workshop based on Rob Nixon’s concept of "slow violence", shares notes by some of the presenters of this multi-disciplinary workshop held at Stellenbosch University.