Open Book Festival will be hosting Workshop Week this June in Cape Town to help South African writers learn crucial writing skills and collaborate with each other.

The six-day series of workshops will take place from June 5–10, 2023 at Bertha House in Mowbray, Cape Town. Expert facilitators will share skills and tools to equip participants for their writing journeys. The Workshop Week is sponsored by the Department of Arts, Sports and Culture and the Heinrich Boll Foundation.

Open Book Festival was launched in 2011 as South Africa’s premier literary festival and showcases the best of South African writing. This year, Open Book Festival has planned three events – an event dedicated to young readers earlier in the year, Workshop Week in June, and the flagship Open Book Festival in early September.

Frankie Murrey, event curator for the Open Book Festival, said:

We piloted Workshop Week in 2022 to offer aspiring and experienced writers the chance to participate in practical workshop sessions with experienced writers. It turned out to be very popular and sessions were fully booked at a rapid rate. It, therefore, made perfect sense to bring this event back for 2023.

The workshop facilitators include academic scholar Dr. Athambile Masola, doctor and writer Dr Dawn Garish, poet, musician, and translator Jacques Coetzee, poet and writer Jerome Coetzee, author and founder of Karavan Press Karina Magdalena Szczurek, queer veterinarian and poet Melissa Sussens, writer and host of the Red Wheelbarrow Society Nondwe Mpuma, writer and editor of Chimurenga Stacy Hardy, healer, poet, and co-founder of impepho press vangile gantsho, and writer-performer Vuyokazi Ngemntu.

This year, there will also be multi-day workshops such as Ukuthula | Invoking Silence, a 3-day workshop that engages and evokes creative writing from and against gender-based violence, and Dawn Garisch’s 2-day workshop called Life as a Work of Fiction.

Check out the full program here.

Date: June 5–10, 2023

Location: Bertha House in Mowbray, Cape Town, South Africa

Tickets are available here. Get your tickets now before they get sold out!