Open Book ran from 5 to 7 September 2025 at the Homecoming Centre and Book Lounge in Cape Town.
Click here to read the festival catalogue.
When you come to this festival, you must open a book and you must be an open book, and you must make more openings for books wherever people think that books and openness don’t make a difference. Literary festivals expose our structures and places, the ones we inhabit and the ones we would like to inhabit – outer space, as world-renowned physicist Adriana Marais (South Africa) discussed, or the inner spaces of the body and the mind, as delineated in their sessions by Goretti Kyomuhendo (Uganda), Foluso Agbaje (Nigeria) and Sarah Uheida (Libya).
We are intensely of our time because we are human. But we are outside it because we are writers: we document our circumstances, and also we take the long view. The common thread – the golden thread – among the local and international authors at Open Book 2025 was their notion of time. Picture them in a circle around the earth, holding their shining lines of story in a great net – unifying, permeable, bioluminescent.
Athambile Masola calls her archival recovery work ukufukama: the hen on her eggs, protecting and warming with her own body the work of the elided personalities of our past. We must remember the ones who come after us as well, Khaya Dlanga insisted. It helps him to be patient even when it is undeserved. “It’s too late for us,” said Charisse Louw, who created and supervised Burning down the house, a collection of young feminist essays. “But I dream for them, too.”
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To make sense of things for yourself and then for others is a joyous burden, the purpose of many of these writers’ professional lives. They write for collective repair. We owe these diplomats a debt we cannot repay, except by buying their books. Reading their books. Talking about them. One audience member who attended every panel she could, commented quietly to me, “Note to self: be like them.”
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To make sense of things for yourself and then for others is a joyous burden, the purpose of many of these writers’ professional lives. They write for collective repair. We owe these diplomats a debt we cannot repay, except by buying their books. Reading their books. Talking about them. One audience member who attended every panel she could, commented quietly to me, “Note to self: be like them.”
In many sessions, especially Nthato Mokgata’s commentary on the music industry, there was the same bleak theme across the archives and letters and interviews. Capitalism – the grinding of our selves into the same sausages that we must buy and eat – makes us sick, makes us anxious.
We need massive investment, more capital – what publisher Mbali Sikakana terms black volume: lots and lots of books by black writers, so that not being perfect can be normalised, and the mental load of being the exception, the exemplar, can be eased. Financial freedom gives people the space and grace to fail in ordinary ways.
Another strong theme from several sessions was that it’s not only mean black girls in boarding school cliques or entitled white people everywhere that suck the joy. Activist and writer Joy Watson, speaking at the launch of Burning down the house, argued that failed governance requires social justice, and that we need to rebuild our institutions: “The house is burned. It’s gone.”
The ongoing damage is in the greed and uselessness of government structures – the master’s houses – that tax books until other people’s experiences are out of our reach; that photocopy the works of individual authors without compensation; that refuse to structure early childcare properly or fund librarians’ salaries, so that our children are deprived and our educators must find two jobs to live. The real work of literacy – to know a language, to know a life – is done by civil society organisations and by exhausted, determined freelance writers, independent publishers, unsalaried booksellers and educators.
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It is also a tremendous outbreath after the three days’ intensive inhalation. Like the ancient Roman days of Carnivale, it overturns authority for a brief period, and then it’s back to business.
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Each year, Open Book ends with Writersports, where Mervyn Sloman, festival director and Book Lounge final boss, pits two teams of writers against each other for improvisation activities. It is filthy and hilarious – mostly because of the audience – and gives us a brief window into how writers work, because we see them in action on the stage.
It is also a tremendous outbreath after the three days’ intensive inhalation. Like the ancient Roman days of Carnivale, it overturns authority for a brief period, and then it’s back to business. You should know that Namibian writer Rémy Ngamije is very quick and very funny, and he is not afraid to cheat.
But we are here for the writing. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s great presence emanated from her as she read and discussed extracts from her novels that have always been part of freedom’s architecture. I understood again that we contain all the iterations of our selves, our people and our species that ever were.
I had the same feeling when Adriana Marais was talking casually in billions of years, and saying that ten percent of your body is as old as the universe. Quantum studies make us look into the smallest molecules that decide processes of life and death. The deeper we look, the more questions arise about what we have missed but was always there. This works for understanding both atoms and Nongqawuse.
The single moment for me was the most open of hymn books: Antjie Krog and Hedley Twidle, together on Unsettled Accounts, ended the session with a simultaneous reading: she in Afrikaans, he in English. Their voices rose and fell, equal. The two overlapped, but did not suffocate – vibrated, were amplified and hung in the air.
- Diane Awerbuck is an award-winning writer and reviewer. Her books currently in shops are Inside your body there are flowers (short stories) and Tears before bedtime (collected family conversations), both from Karavan Press. She is fine-tuning a poetry collection, April Fool’s Day.
Also read:
Periscope: An overview of the Books on the Bay festival 2025