FRIDAY 13 May:
[45] 16h00 Writers of few(er) words
Karina Szczurek chats to Mark Winkler (Ink), Nick Mulgrew (Stations) and Niq Mhlongo (Affluenza) about the art of keeping it short while ensuring impact.
SATURDAY 14 May:
[67] 11h30 Writing relationships
Chinelo Okparanta (Under the Udala Trees), David Cornwell (Like It Matters) and Nthikeng Mohlele (Pleasure) get to the heart of how writers depict love, sex and friendship through their characters. Chaired by Karina Szczurek (Invisible Others).
[74] 13h00 André Brink Memorial Lecture
(Photographs: Victor Dlamini)
Karina Szczurek welcomes you to the second annual lecture in honour of her late husband André Brink, and will introduce Sindiwe Magona (prolific author and writer-in-residence, University of the Western Cape). She will offer an outsider’s take on this giant of South African letters in a talk titled “André Brink: enigma, betrayer, villain or hero?”
SUNDAY 15 May:
[116] 11h30 Literary letters
Finuala Dowling chairs a discussion with Margaret Daymond (Everyday Matters: Selected letters of Dora Taylor, Bessie Head and Lilian Ngoyi), Karin Schimke (Flame in the Snow) and Karina Szczurek (Flame in the Snow), about what the personal correspondence of significant figures reveals about their writing, themes and lives.
Book tickets here: FLF 2016
KARINA M. SZCZUREK is the author of Truer than Fiction: Nadine Gordimer Writing Post-Apartheid South Africa. She is also the editor of Touch: Stories of Contact, Encounters with André Brink; Contrary: Critical Responses to the Novels of André Brink (with Willie Burger), and the 2015 SSDA anthology, Water: New Short Fiction from Africa (with Nick Mulgrew). She also writes short stories, essays and literary criticism. Her debut novel Invisible Others was published in 2014.
Reading dead authors is not unusual, but opening the late Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air feels different. He wrote it knowing he was dying and it was published by his widow a year after his death. The immediacy of the knowledge is uncannily palpable. For me, the experience was even more intimate on two different levels. Firstly, I also had a cancer scare recently and Kalanithi was my age when he died. In retrospect, his memoir made me count my blessings, again, as I am healthy and have escaped with just a fright. Secondly, like me, as a young person he struggled to choose between two vocations: medicine and literature. Unlike me though, he chose medicine. But literary longings had never left him and when life became unbearable, like many of us he found some amount of solace in the written word.
Every new book by Niq Mhlongo is literature to my ears. His three novels, Dog Eat Dog (2004), After Tears (2007) and 
The thing with poetry is that it either works for you or it doesn’t. I do not know many people who read it for pleasure. Nowadays, poetry certainly seems to be an acquired taste. I often abstain myself, prose being my staple food. But every now and then a poem or, if I am lucky, an entire volume comes along that makes my heart swell with gladness. Sihle Ntuli’s Stranger is one of those gems. The author asked me to review his debut poetry collection. I do not know why, but I am delighted, and honoured, that he did.
Jeanette Winterson is one of my favourite writers of fiction and non-fiction. Her recent memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (2011) was a revelation. I was introduced to her work at university with the by now classic novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). Her Lighthousekeeping (2004) is one of the most moving love stories I have ever read. Among many texts, it echoes Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The main character Silver reappears in other Winterson novels. As does the line: “Tell me a story.” Winterson is known for her retellings of myths and legends, her writing is rich in intertextuality. I loved her modern rendering of the Atlas myth, Weight (2005).
Melissa de Villiers was born in Grahamstown and educated at Rhodes, but she is a citizen of the world. She lives in Singapore, travels widely, and often returns to South Africa. The nine stories in her debut The Chameleon House are informed by migrations. The concept of home is interrogated, as is contemporary South Africa and its difficult past, “old ways unextinguished and forever edging forward, smudging boundaries”. A woman inherits her grandfather’s weekend house and with it the question of ownership. Another is the victim of sly abuse. An illicit couple is caught up in a blackout. Lust and power mingle with loneliness, an “emptiness – desolate and cold – that would claim her should her hold on him flicker and fail.” Loyalties are tested when four friends sharing a house in London unwittingly harbour a traitor among them. This is powerful storytelling from a writer to watch.
The feeling one is left with after reading Sandra Hill’s debut story collection Unsettled is reflected in the title of the book. Hill paints vivid portraits of what it means to be a woman in different places and times. It is a finely layered picture of the everyday and the unusual. The mother of one of the characters insists that one should read poetry “slowly, expectantly, the way you eat oysters”, as the “magic…comes after you swallow.” Although every story is a fully contained piece, read together, they acquire that magic of swallowing oysters. Saturated with local flavours, settings, history, Unsettled offers evocative, intimate glimpses of women’s lives – their dreams, desires, worries and regrets – many readers will find uncannily familiar, sometimes perhaps difficult to acknowledge: “Life can take us away from where we belong, but we don’t lose the longing for it… If we are lucky we get to make our way back.”
Karina Magdalena 