Small-town setting, big ideas — the Booktown Richmond festival

Richmond Dutch Reformed Church. Photo: Rebecca Willis

4 Dec 2024

The festival in the middle of the Karoo is a living testament to the levelling power of books and the democratic nature of the written word.

I never really believed I would go to South Africa to talk about my first and last book.

Sure, I said I would, but that was when I was tramping across the English countryside with my friend Angie Butler, who is one of the organisers of the Booktown Richmond festival, and I wanted to support her.

We covered many muddy fields while Angie expatiated on the difficulties of finding sponsorship for the festival each year and of nailing down the right mix of authors. Then, as we slid along the sodden ground for the next few miles I would talk her through the latest chapters of Life, Death & Getting Dressed, my book investigating the significance of clothes to humans and in particular why we think we have nothing to wear. It is also about how fashion tyrannises women, although to look at us then, in our bespattered state, you might have wondered what I knew about that subject.

I did know, though, that the festival was a passion project for my friend, and also a part of her grieving process for her husband. So I said I would attend in the same way I would promise to go to her 100th birthday party. It seemed a distant and unlikely possibility.

And yet, somehow, here I was, fresh off a long-haul flight to Cape Town and heading for the middle of the Karoo, a place which – possibly because it echoes the word kangaroo – I pictured as an outback, desert-y sort of place.

Not entirely wrong.

There were no kangaroos, it turned out, but instead lots of sheep and springbok, all miniaturised by a vast landscape of bleak and empty beauty, where an occasional windmill with a water tank signalled human life.

The little town of Richmond itself, just off the main Johannesburg-to-Cape Town Road road, has a church and a few shops, none of which, in all honesty, seem likely to be essential to the world of book publishing. But it is here, in the small and slightly shabby library, on rows of mismatched chairs, that the Booktown festival takes place.

Read more: Richmond, between Johannesburg and Cape Town – a culture town worth the stop

In this low-key setting, over three days every spring (Southern Hemisphere time), more than 30 writers open up about their works and the work that went into them. To say that the subject matter is broad would be an understatement: we heard about tracking the enormous owls of Siberia, parenting a trans teenager, New Zealand pubs, indentured workers on sugar plantations and George Orwell (from two different angles: topographical and marital).

Some writers Zoomed in on a large screen from far away – Susie Orbach, inspiring and incisive as ever, spoke from London, as did Louisa Treger, whose novel The Paris Muse is about Dora Maar and her toxic relationship with Picasso. One author was in Australia (Anna Funder) and another in Minneapolis (Jonathan Slaght).

A session at Booktown Richmond. (Photo: Rebecca Willis)

Most writers, though, were present in the flesh – notably 2022’s Booker Prize winner, Shehan Karunatilaka. His two funny, clever and engaging sessions about his books The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and Chinaman stole the show for me, and I suspect for many others in the room. (He’s also very good at moving suitcases around, but that’s another story…)

Some authors chose to read from their books – both Michael Boyd’s The Weight of Shade and Michael Cawood Green’s The Ghosting of Ann Armstrong left us in suspense and wanting to know more.

South African topics included Beverley Roos-Muller on Hunting the Seven, her book about how the Gugulethu assassins were exposed; Jane Evans on A Path Unexpected, about the setting up of schools on farms for workers’ children, and an appreciation of the poet and activist CJ (“Jonty”) Driver by his publisher, Karina Szczurek.

Tim Cohen of Daily Maverick was the only person to talk about a book that had not yet been written, but he managed to make us look forward to it nevertheless. And Margaretha Deysel Stemmet’s talk about her life as an opera singer had everyone in tears.

The Richmond Dutch Reformed Church. (Photo: Rebecca Willis)

When sessions were in Afrikaans, non-speakers like me repaired to the garden of the Vetmuis (Fat Mouse) cafe next door for tea and toast with apricot jam. (When I went back for lunch, the soup and bread also came with apricot jam – is that a thing here, or just a way for vegetarians to get some calories in the meat-scape of South Africa?). If you were in a jam mood, you could browse in Fogarty’s pop-up shop at the back of the library, and buy the books while the author’s words were still ringing in your ears.

Darryl David, who co-founded the festival in 2005 and is a lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, acted as MC, frequent interviewer and timekeeper, making sure no one exceeded their allotted span. He had imported the technical team from UWC which meant that the complex juggling of microphones, Zoom calls and camera relays was frictionless. So, although the homespun and sometimes borderline shambolic nature of the event made you wonder when something would go wrong, it never did.

The Booktown Festival is an amiable combination of intimate small-town setting and big ideas. Plus some very big names. It struck me as a living testament to the levelling power of books and the democratic nature of the written word. Sponsors permitting, long may it continue. DM

Rebecca Willis is a features journalist, writer and author of Life, Death & Getting Dressed. She worked at Vogue for 15 years and also at The Independent on Sunday. She was associate editor of Intelligent Life, the former sister magazine of The Economist, where she wrote the “Applied Fashion” column.

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