The Open Book Festival, Cape Town’s flagship literary gathering, will hold its main event from September 4–6, 2026, at the HCC: Homecoming Centre (the venue formerly known as The Fugard Theatre). The festival has been a fixture of the city’s literary calendar since 2011, and this year’s edition continues its tradition of bringing South African and international authors together for panels, readings, book launches, and community conversations.

Open Book spans three engagements across the year. The season opened with Youth Fest in March, a free, community-facing programme that sends storytellers, writers, and poets into schools and libraries across underfunded parts of Cape Town, donating books along the way. That was followed by Workshop Week in June, a low-cost, skills-focused week at Bertha House in Mowbray for writers at every stage, covering everything from craft across genres to hands-on sessions in comics and calligraphy. The main Festival in September closes out the year with around 60 events over three days, built around four goals: drawing top writers and audiences, showcasing the best of South African writing, nurturing a love of reading among Cape Town’s youth, and ensuring the events reflect the city’s diversity.

Several sessions stand out for readers tracking African and diaspora literature. Athambile Masola sits down with Maneo Mohale for a one-on-one on Black women’s histories of resistance and erasure, while I.O. Echeruo, Lebogang Matseke, and Mphuthumi Ntabeni join vangile gantsho to unpack African cosmologies and the blurred line between the seen and unseen worlds. Speculative fiction gets its own spotlight too: John Hunt and Keely Shinners join Echeruo for Between Two Worlds, a conversation on novels that straddle the familiar and the fantastic, while a Beyond Dystopia workshop with the Climate Lounge draws on Ursula K. Le Guin and the Pan-African anthology Our Move Next to imagine liveable, post-capitalist futures.

Poetry runs strong throughout, with Koleka Putuma, Gabeba Baderoon, and Sanah Ahsan among the voices closing out the festival at New Worlds in Bloom, and a special Pass Me the Mic showcase marking 50 years since the 1976 Soweto Youth Uprising. The New Contrast 212 launch honors poets Diana Ferrus and Zoë Wicomb with readings from Pumla Dineo Gqola, Zubeida Jaffer, and Ingrid de Kok, among others.

Fiction fans can catch Sue Nyathi, Kopano Matlwa, and Krystle Zara Appiah across multiple panels on love, class, and the body, while publishers Morné Bam (Penguin Random House), Jessica Powers (Catalyst Press), and Stevlyn Vermeulen (Jonathan Ball) weigh in on AI, algorithms, and the future of South African publishing in We’re Still Human. Journalist and comedian Rebecca Davis brings the laughs with her one-woman show on AI and human obsolescence, and the festival wraps with the ever-popular Writersports and Letterhead Quiz.

Most sessions are R50, with several free events for younger readers and community programming. Tickets and the full schedule are available via the Open Book Festival programme page.