The Open Book Festival is an annual literary festival held in Cape Town, South Africa with a focus on South African literature in an international context. The event includes over 150 literary events, featuring over 100 authors over 5 days. Although South African literature features prominently literature from across the world is also featured with both Anglophone and Francophone authors featuring prominently in the festivals events.
8-642: Main venue of the event is located at the Fugard Theatre but also includes other nearby venues in Cape Town such as The District 6 Museum , The Homecoming Centre, the Townhouse Hotel, The Slave Lodge , The Museum, The National Gallery, Central Library and Lobby Books. The first Open Book festival was held in 2011. The event was initiated by Mervyn Sloman of The Book Lounge (a Cape Town-based bookshop) and Ben Williams of Books Live (a literary focused subsidiary of
16-729: A venue that hosted plays, musicals, operas, and cinema and book events such as film premieres and the Open Book Festival . Abraham, with Daniel Galloway as the managing director and producer (December 2010 to January 2020), ran the Fugard as a philanthropic endeavour. After announcing a temporary closure, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic , in March 2020, the theatre offered online streaming performances overseen by then newly appointed general manager Lamees Albertus and Artistic Director Greg Karvellas. However,
24-478: The Laurence Olivier Award -winning revival of The Magic Flute , starring South African performers of Mark Dornford-May 's Isango Portobello , Eric Abraham wanted to create a space in Cape Town to house South African talent. Abraham underwrote the construction of the theatre, naming it after playwright Athol Fugard . Developed with Dornford-May and Mannie Manim, Rennie Scurr Adendorff began renovating
32-695: The National Heritage listed neo-Gothic Congregational Church Hall and two former warehouses, including the Sacks Futeran building, in September 2009. Politicians such as Kgalema Motlanthe and Trevor Manuel as well as actors such as Alan Rickman and Janet Suzman attended the grand opening in February 2010. Fugard himself premiered his play The Train Driver at the theatre in March 2010. The Fugard became
40-474: The South African newspaper Times Live ). The festival was founded to bring the best literature in the world to Cape Town; to promote South African writing on an internationally; and to make books and literature more accessible to young readers. The event is noted for being more representative and drawing a wider range of authors than other South African book festivals. Most of the 150 events fall into one of
48-547: The financial losses became too great, and there was little confidence that it would be safe enough to reopen soon. Abraham announced in March 2021 that the theatre would be closing and the building would be handed back to the District Six Museum Board, whom Abraham hoped would find use out of the space. Since its physical closure, the Fugard Theatre website has been changed into an online archive , which lays out
56-627: The following sub-events with particular focuses: Fugard Theatre The Fugard Theatre , also known as The Fugard , was opened in the District Six area of Cape Town , South Africa, in February 2010. It closed in March 2021 and was handed over to the District Six Museum by its founder Eric Abraham . The theatre reopened in 2022 as the District Six Homecoming Centre , while the Fugard's archive moved online. Following
64-408: The full history of the Fugard Theatre including a full listing of all past productions as well as a video series detailing the journey of the theatre. The archive intends to secure the memory of the space and offer the public a free-to-access, accurate historical archive of the theatre. "Another icon has fallen", John Kani wrote of the closure, and Lebo Mashile called it a "painful death". Many in
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