Literary festivals, salty paths and killing sprees

What it lacked was a good café

1. The beginnings of the Franschhoek Literary Festival

2. Books to die for

3. Advice for a first draft

4. Walking into a memoir

1. “Back in the mid-2000’s, I had the idea of starting a literary festival in the Cape. The question was to decide where might suit it best? So I got into my car and drove around attractive towns in the Western Cape. Franschhoek was walkable, its wines good and its location, cupped in the palm of a handful of blue mountains, instantly inviting. The Franschhoek Literary Festival opened in 2007, on a hectic winter weekend in mid-May. Franschhoek found itself over-run by novelists, biographers, poets, publishers and journalists, from home and abroad. What it lacked was a good café.” For more on the café, see the rest of Christopher Hope’s Substack post at Café Complicity.

2. “As I type this, I’m on a serious killing spree across the Western Cape. First, I committed multiple murders in a small village there, possibly Stanford. Then I gouged out someone’s eyes before murdering them in Cape Town, and I’m currently murdering someone in Knysna and trying to make that one look like a suicide. OK, no need to make a call to Crimeline to report me yet. I’ve just finished reading three killer debut South African crime authors that you really need to know about.” - Novelist Paige Nick reviewing for the Sunday Times: Making a Killing by Bonnie Espie; Unsolicited by Andrea Shaw; If the Dead Could Talk by Juliette Mnqeta. Paige’s latest novel is Book People.

3. “My advice [regarding a first draft] would be to allow yourself to write a very imperfect one, then put it aside for a while, then go back to it and rethink, rewrite, revise. The first draft should allow you to get everything down, and the second should allow you to turn that into a story.” - From The New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman:

4. Much has been written about The Salt Path saga and it has thrown up many thoughts about the nature of memoirs. Here are the opinions of two writers on Substack: Rose Hurst and Dru Jaeger.