For the first time since its inception, National Book Week (NBW) was celebrated in all nine provinces, which is a great feat for the industry. This year, the proud host of the campaign the South African Book Development Council (SABDC), went all out to promote the importance of books. Read more
Wednesday 7 September marked the start of the 2016 Open Book Festival. This book festival, that ran from 7–11 September, is a huge event in Cape Town that welcomes all authors, academics, literalists, and book lovers to insightful and fun sessions on authors and their stories. Read more
Publishing chief executives have been urged to spend a day working on the bookshop floor by the new president of the Booksellers Association.
Ros de la Hey (pictured), who is owner of the Main Street Trading Company in St Boswells, said she hoped to launch a new scheme for booksellers and publishers, called Adopt a C.e.o.
Read the article on The Bookseller.
Open Book 2016 has kicked off and will run until the 11th of September. Have a look at this year’s programme on their website.
The UK’s Publishers Association (PA) has followed its membership survey with what its leadership calls a manifesto, setting out key priorities on which the publishing industry wants government focus during and after its negotiations to leave the European Union. Brexit: Implications for the UK Publishing Industry is a four-page document out today (September 6), talking points for what the industry sees as important. Publishing in the United Kingdom, according to the PA, collectively contributes more than £4.4 billion (US$5.9 billion) to the economy. Digital revenues comprise some 32 percent of that, the PA says, while export sales of books account for 43 percent. Read more here.
The South African Booksellers Association would like to congratulate all of the winning publishers and booksellers who took home awards from the annual Sefika Awards dinner tonight. The evening gala event, sponsored by Novus Holdings, Imperial Sasfin Logistics, Geodis Wilson and Sapnet is arranged to thank and celebrate both booksellers and publishers for the roles they play in promoting literacy and a culture of reading by producing and selling quality books in South Africa. Read more
Sweet medicine takes place in Harare at the height of Zimbabwe’s economic woes in 2008. Tsitsi, a young woman, raised by her strict, devout Catholic mother, believes that hard work, prayer and an education will ensure a prosperous and happy future. She does well at her mission boarding school, and goes on to obtain a scholarship to attend university, but the change in the economic situation in Zimbabwe destroys the old system where hard work and a degree guaranteed a good life. Out of university, Tsitsi finds herself in a position much lower than she had set her sights on, working as a clerk in the office of the local politician, Zvobgo. With a salary that barely provides her a means to survive, she finds herself increasingly compromising her Christian values to negotiate ways to get ahead. Sweet medicine is a thorough and evocative attempt at grappling with a variety of important issues in the postcolonial context: tradition and modernity; feminism and patriarchy; spiritual and political freedoms and responsibilities; poverty and desperation; and wealth and abundance. Read more
Meet Tannie Maria: She’s fifty-something, short and soft (perhaps a bit too soft in the wrong places) with brown curls and untidy Afrikaans. She is also the agony aunt for the local paper, the Klein Karoo Gazette. One day, her life takes a sinister turn when a woman in the area is murdered and she becomes entangled in the investigation… to the intense irritation of a handsome local policeman. But what else will this amateur detective uncover in a small town marinated in secrets? Warm, poignant and entertaining, Sally Andrew’s delightful heroine blends together intrigue, romance and cooking in this irresistible new mystery, complete with a few mouth-watering recipes. Read more
‘There are many suns,’ he said. ‘Each day has its own. Some are small, some are big. I’m named after the small ones.’ It is 1903. A lame and frail Malangana – ‘Little Suns’ – searches for his beloved Mthwakazi after many lonely years spent in Lesotho. Mthwakazi was the young woman he had fallen in love with twenty years earlier, before the assassination of Hamilton Hope ripped the two of them apart. Read more
It is a shock when she sees Gustav again at one of the baron’s many functions. The hardships of the war, however, has taken its toll and there is little left of the once beautiful and rich woman. He did not recognize her immediately. She makes an effort to ensure that it stays that way because the humiliation would be too much for her with her calloused hands, her dull hair and her skinny body. Read more
