Literatea is an interview series which brings together prominent and emerging voices in African writing, editing, publishing, translation, marketing, distribution, and retail to discuss the craft of bringing African storytelling to the continent and the rest of the world. From award-winning novelists and poets to literary agents and editors, from indie publishers and booksellers to prize juries—Literatea pours the first cup and stirs the conversation.
In this conversation filled with humour, grace, and insight, Frankie Murrey sheds light on the process of organising one of the most popular literary festivals in Africa and writing her debut collection of short stories.
Frankie Murrey worked in the book retail sector for many years before becoming the coordinator of Open Book Festival. In 2015, her work was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She resigned from Open Book Festival at the end of 2019, but has since returned to a space she missed intensely. In 2023, she published her debut collection, Everyone Dies (Karavan Press), which won the HSS Award for Best Emerging Writer in the fiction category.
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RÉMY NGAMIJE: Let’s start at the beginning.
FRANKIE MURREY: Always a good idea.
RN: What does the term “literary festival” mean to you?
FM: Eish!
RN: No date, no dinner. Just straight to the hard stuff.
FM: Before I was directly involved in running one, I would probably have had a simple answer—something like “a place to listen to people speaking about their books and to meet writers.”
Now though, I think about the evolution of Open Book Festival (OBF) and what I hope the space is. For a long time now, I have thought of it as an opportunity for people to come together to have meaningful conversations through the lens of books. I have thought of it as a space where people feel safe.
And as a place where people can find community.
RN: That word—community—is the theme of the year, I think.
FM: The world we are living in is so often multiple heartbreaks all at once, over and over, that spaces like OBF feel more important than ever.
Where can you go to breathe? Where can you find spaces opening?
That I think is what I hope OBF is.
But then I wonder: is Open Book a literary festival?
The yes and the no of that. The term “literary festival” so often feels exclusive and unwelcoming. The “keeper of the keys has the right to refuse you entry” kind of vibe. Maybe this is an(other) example of an industry in desperate need of transformation.
RN: The Open Book Festival was my first outing as an author in September, 2019. I had attended it once before, when I was still living in Cape Town. I cannot recall which year—when Teju Cole was invited. It was all of the things you said: a space in which meaningful conversation could be had using books as a backdrop; it was also a community of readers and writers, of all the people who work in the literary industry—publishers, booksellers, publicists, all of them were there. It was quite revelatory to me. And so welcoming.
Let’s focus on “space.” What does this mean to you as the organiser of OBF?
One of the things you have at your disposal is the Mother City and its plethora of venues (not that all of them are suitable or willing to be a part of the literary project) but I think it is a big drawcard.
How much of the festival is dependent on physical space?
FM: So before I even start answering your question, I need to speak—briefly—about 2019, but it does kind of relate to space. It was the year we first met. It was also the year I resigned—from a dream job you understand. OBF has never managed to employ more than one person on a full-time basis, and my decision was made largely with that in mind: someone else needed a turn to inhabit that privileged space. To learn what goes into running a festival as well as the opportunity to curate powerful conversations. Space—in the case of OBF, and I think many other similarly placed arts organisations—is also a conversation about access to funding, about who gets to steer the ship.
And then 2019 led directly into the COVID-19 years.
I was able to support myself through that period of time, partly because of my connection to South African poets. But on the OBF front, the festival shifted to podcasts, opening up a different kind of space. We’ve continued producing podcasts since then—for the most part recording in-person sessions. It means that people can access the conversations we host in an ongoing way. There’s something about creating an archive which really excites me. Yes, it’s partly a history of OBF, but more importantly, it’s an opportunity to capture such crucial voices at different moments in their—and South Africa’s and the world’s—journey.
But to come back to the actual question I think you are asking about physical space in the city.
Cape Town.
I mean I live here.
But!
The legacy of apartheid is everywhere. The lack of transformation is apparent. So when you speak about space, and running a festival that prioritises marginalised voices, and conversations that centre queer folks, mental health, and gender-based violence, it is through that lens that one has to view spaces.
But maybe let me start at the beginning.
RN: Always a good idea.
FM: Ha!
The beginning was wanting a festival that happened in the city in which we lived. We didn’t want to travel, we wanted it here. Which comes with pros and cons. If you’re organising a destination festival, those who travel to it are there to attend events—and so you are competing with very little else. If you’re happening in a place like Cape Town, however, people are choosing between attending OBF or going to the rugby, exhibitions, beach, mall, brunch, or possibly just staying home. You get the picture.
Once that decision was made, though, we were clear about what we wanted from the space: the venue needed to accommodate multiple sessions simultaneously and it needed to be close to transport hubs allowing for easier accessibility for those using public transport.
With those filters, what was then the Fugard Theatre was the only choice. And from the start they were more than a venue, they provided vital infrastructure. The Fugard Theatre is no more, but the space remains; OBF now runs from the Homecoming Centre (HCC).
And still, I don’t think there is another space in Cape Town that would support what we do in the same way while simultaneously enabling the number of events we host to happen. We work with a lot of spaces through the year and even over the days of OBF; we have an incredible relationship with Bertha House (we run Workshop Week there) but they are not equipped to handle a festival. We work with so many public libraries (but again one event at a time), schools, the Cape Town Museum of Childhood…the list goes on.
The OBF needs a hub, and certainly for now, that hub is the HCC.
RN: There is no getting around the issue of space and its essentiality in hosting in-person literary festivals. Regardless of the size or comfort of the venue, a meeting space is hard to come by for many organisers, mostly because of some of the things you have highlighted. Not everyone believes that readers and writers should meet, that they should have the conversations that need to be had—who wants to be Ground Zero for rebellion?
I think it is one of the ways in which some of the malevolent powers that be are shutting down dialogue, by targeting the spaces that could foment intellectual hostility to their ideas. Galleries, concert halls, theatres, cafés that sell proletariat coffee. Space, I think, will continue to be a deciding factor for literary festivals.
After space, what becomes the next consideration factor for you and OBF?
For us, space and where we can get it on a calendar is key. After that, it’s the concept or theme or focus of the festival.
FM: That sentence—“not everyone believes readers and writers should meet”—I think about OBF and, honestly, we can plan conversations, but the spirit of the festival comes from the conversations that happen off-stage, on the street, or at the bar.
What we realised last year, powerfully so, is that OBF is owned by the audience, many of whom are also participants.
RN: That, ultimately, is the end-goal. To have a festival that is not defined by space, but by the spirit it fosters independently of a particular space.
FM: Yes. Side-tracking myself again, though. Space is key, but tied to that and so much more is funding. You can have done all the reading, have incredible ideas for conversations, have people who are keen to come, but without funds to pay staff, participants and all of the other people who make a festival possible, you just can’t get off the ground.
You may manage to convince people to offer services pro bono for a year, maybe two, but it’s not sustainable, nor does it respect the skills each of those people bring.
And here is a challenge OBF faces every year: we deliberately keep our ticket prices low so that it remains accessible, and we issue hundreds of complimentary tickets. So ticket sales are never going to generate revenue. We rely heavily on sponsorship and have failed to attract many corporates with whom we think we could successfully collaborate. Many of those we approach either point to in-house CSI programmes they run, or their marketing team doesn’t see value in what we do. Which leaves us needing government funding: municipal, provincial, or national.
This year in particular has been a nightmare. The results for national and provincial funding haven’t been confirmed, and so we—all who applied—have to wait.
It’s awful for this conversation to end up being one that centres money so quickly, but that is the reality. We have done so much reading in preparation to making decisions about who we can invite, but without the funding, some of those decisions are already made.
Honestly, when I think about how crucial the creative sector is to how people understand this world, to how people understand themselves, I cannot believe the entire sector has to fight this hard all of the time to get what they need to produce the essential. I don’t know how we are supposed to process what is currently happening in the world without the lens of the arts.
So where is the funding? I would love to get your take on this as well.
Am I missing something? Is there a route I have been blind to?
RN: Nope.
FM: I feel like I am sounding cynical.
RN: Nah, you sound like a proper literary citizen. If this shit has not yet made you bitter I am not sure you are doing it right.
FM: Please know I am also as excited as I have ever been about the writing, about the people, about the gathering that will happen.
RN: You have to be in order to carry on.
FM: And it will happen. We are resilient, and a solution (or maybe solutions) will be found.
RN: I think the reason why it is generally not in the best interests of power for writers and readers to meet is precisely because of the conversations that will be had in the “place” but also outside the place. If it was just a matter of shutting down conversation in one location it would be an easy exercise. But the threads of thoughts that trail outside if the venue are the real threat. As Nemik states in the first season of Andor, “the rebellion has many fronts.” And that is what power fears. And why spaces are important, but also why space is premised on that most pernicious of resources: funding.
There is no way to get around the issue of funding when it comes to conceptualising and planning, organising, or hosting a literary festival—those are the three phases that I break it down to when it comes to the Doek Literary Festival (DLF). Each aspect requires its own resources.
In the conceptualisation and planning phase, how do you “hope to secure funding” versus how you “actually secure funding”? For me, the former involves drafting a long list of potential collaborators while the latter involves begging, borrowing, and stealing. I think I might have to start an OnlyFans account for the next one. Do you know if there is a market for knee photos? This is also the phase where the design partner that I work with—Turipamwe for the last two editions—and I figure out how to create the experiential aspects of the festival. Every single thing we add to the mood board is determined by funding and what we can reasonably secure.
Then, of course, organisation. I have a massive, pageless-Google Document set to infinite scroll with all of the to-do lists and checklists that I need to attend to: invitation letter templates; writers’ bios and photos; links to their works; flight and airport pick-up schedules; hotel bookings and dietary restrictions; medical and emergency considerations; conversation themes and topics; venue bookings and timetables; decor, audio-visual, and lighting needs; marking materials like press releases—I am telling you, in the organising phase it can get nightmarish, especially when funding is non-existent, partial, or late. That is when I start fixing holes with holes. How do you organise your chaos?
FM: Glad you’re also taking life lessons from Star Wars. [RN: I will say it with my whole chest: Andor is the only one that matters.] I think so much of my learning was through Star Trek. And music—lyrics that blew my mind.
But, yes, conversations, especially in the kinds of spaces we’re talking about, are subversive, and the communities they can be part of building are powerful. And funding—the lack of—is an easy obstacle. We tried crowdfunding years ago and may try some form of it again this year. We shall see.
But funding aside, I hear you on the lists and templates, the notes that cover everything from who eats what to how a name is pronounced—I really battle with “Car- in” versus “Ca-rin” so often the rider for events will have notes for all staff involved so we can pronounce things correctly. I also have links to voice clips so people can hear names being pronounced and practice.
RN: Now that is what I call meticulous.
FM: Step one for me is knowing that no matter what I do, there will always be something that happens that is completely unexpected. The better prepared the entire team is, the better we are able to handle whatever spanner the universe has thrown in the works on a given day. If the team isn’t feeling prepared, it means I haven’t done my job, and that all sorts of things are going to need attention.
Step two is the timeline. It reminds me of everything that needs to happen according to the month. Right now, I am running through checklists to make sure Workshop Week (next week) runs smoothly, while reading for the September festival, working on the first phase of programming (again for Sept), and searching for funding. I also have a daily meeting (for myself) on my calendar that reminds me about things that need urgent attention. And then I have left field thoughts that I send to myself on Whatsapp. Those notes usually end up being included in one of the other documents.
During the festival itself, I have the programme printed and write notes all over it, and if something is urgent it becomes a hand note I write on myself.
And because I am a fool, the team is also briefed to spot when I have put my notes down and forgotten them. So yes, lists, then more lists, and just for fun, more lists.
RN: I remember the first edition of the DLF was such a novel exertion that it took a long time to recover from it—the buzz of hosting it and the post-festival blues when the writers had left, when the conversations had moved on, and Windhoek was, well, still Windhoek. The existential dread of having to run through the organisation gauntlet again almost made me scrap the second edition. Because, you know what, despite telling myself that the festival did not have to be bigger—merely different—I really did want both: bigger and different.
But at the same time I could see that the planning would need to be more extensive, the organisation would be more onerous, and the hosting would require more elements of luck than I could reasonably plan or hope for. I still think of the series of fortunate events that made the second edition of the festival a success; so much of it depends on the writers’ patience and generosity, and their willingness to help out, or their understanding that some things they might typically be used to at other literary festivals would not be present in a young literary tradition like ours. In the end, though, the lists helped because, hey, we had a second one.
What are some things that go into organising OBF that you thought you would have cracked by now that still make your head spin?
For me, it is poets. Every year I say I will work with them and every damn year there are more of them on the line-up.
FM: Sjoe! The learning curve of the first of anything is always some kind of madness. And the recovery time needed is real. The first year we did OBF, in 2011, we had venues scattered all over the city and also a bunch of places where people could buy books. I spent that edition running. I was absolutely shattered by the end of it.
I wouldn’t say that OBF now is a well-oiled machine, but it is definitely a smoother ride than the early years. It would be a whole lot easier if I didn’t keep adding things to it, but then I think it also wouldn’t be as vibrant an event. Splitting the festival into three parts has really allowed us to focus on each part differently, but it also means there isn’t really a quiet time. As I’m writing this, I’ve also got a manuscript open that I need to read for September, and I’ve just done a final run-through of the list of things that need to happen tomorrow (Day 1 of Workshop Week).
My favourite part of planning OBF is definitely the conversations about the books—figuring out how they speak to each other. The slow shift from conversation into something that is actually a solid event. And the collaborations—I love figuring out how to merge what we do with what other people are doing. The less fun part, the part that I will never be good at, is securing funding.
RN: That thing! Again.
FM: Followed closely by travel arrangements.
RN: I have gotten marginally better at that.
FM: I think my worst was booking a flight for someone that arrived after his first event.
RN: Well, damn. I almost booked a flight that would arrive after the DLF once. I was so tired from looking at screens that day.
FM: Eish!
The hole that opened up in my stomach when I realised what I had done. I have never had more than a loose relationship with time, so handling travel is an area I am never going to be comfortable with.
But poets you say.
RN: God sent festival organisers poets to test their commitment to the literary game!
FM: I feel like poets almost deserve their own conversation because, yes, they are a lot!
And every year there are more.
RN: Where are they all coming from? Can we not plug that kaiju portal in the Pacific?
FM: I have a love-hate relationship with them. There is the poetry, and poetry performances that will live in me forever. There are the high school students standing in front of a room of strangers, performing for the first time. And there is a push to make something different—to move away from our normal format and think multimedia, to play with lighting, to shift what we do with sound. And, poets were what got me through the COVID-19 years when I had almost no other work except what they brought me.
But, yes, they can also bring what seems like more than their fair share of chaos. There’s always a last minuteness that is waiting (just when you thought it was safe to go outside). I am trying to think of some of the things I’ve been asked for over the years, but I think it’s like music I don’t like. My brain just won’t retain the information. Multiple piano requests, lots of projection requests of content that just doesn’t work.
I think my biggest thing every year are the participants who go missing.
RN: Oh, no!
One year an author went missing for hours because “the mountain called him”. Another year one couldn’t be found because he misread his schedule and went for a drive up the West Coast. Other times you phone and phone and finally get through to someone who is obviously still asleep.
I’ve gotten to a point now where I’m better at letting go of something I have no control over. If someone doesn’t pitch, then the event goes ahead without them. If they arrive late, we will get them in if we are able to. Everything that we can actually plan for is in place, but the festival—any event I’m sure—will throw curveballs that you just can’t predict.
RN: Relinquishing control is not something I count amongst my strengths. I would probably get a three-animal blood hex put on someone if they failed to show up for an event. I make no pretenses at being mature. I am what I am: a tired, overworked festival organiser. With connections to people who can chant up some Macbethian cauldron magic. Which helps, of course. But not with fundraising, strangely enough.
I have not asked about this directly yet, but its importance has cropped up during our conversation so far: the dreaded “f” word.
Funding.
The bane of my existence.
For the layman, I think you need to explain what funding is and what it is not from a festival organiser’s point of view. Then, of course, we have to talk about the most ideal sources of funding.
FM: I snort-laughed imagining you bent over a cauldron, but I consider myself warned; I will not cross you. But, honestly, it would be all of the amazing if you could get the magic to work when it comes to funding. Imagine all the time we could spend doing the part we enjoy instead of the hours and hours spent trying to craft proposals.
RN: Oh, I can imagine. I do imagine. And every year I am disappointed.
FM: It’s an interesting question, what funding is and what it isn’t.
In the broadest sense, it’s money that allows the OBF to happen, but my personal take on it is that it’s dreams that either live or sit in the digital drawer for another year. It’s having awesome sound so everyone can hear clearly versus people missing half of what gets said. It’s having a team on board versus trying to cover multiple jobs with too few people. It’s being able to buy books to donate to students so they are able to start their own collections. It’s being able to pay participation fees so those involved know that their time is valuable. It’s being able to bring people from around South Africa and the continent into one place for conversations that we all need to have. Or to just be in the same place at the same time. Breathing through the fucked up time we find outselves in.
But I don’t think that’s the answer you’re after. Funding is also about partnerships. It’s about finding organisations who recognise the value of what you’re doing and want to either support it or align themselves with it. And, ideally, it comes with as few strings as possible. In the best case scenario, you can use the money where you need it most.
OBF hasn’t succeeded in getting any significant corporate sponsorship, and I don’t know how to change that. Which is a problem. Funding from other sources is stretched thinner than ever which means, I think, that either events (and here I don’t just mean book events) are going to disappear or they are going to change significantly to suit a drastically reduced budget. The thought of that leaves me cold. Spaces where people can gather to support each other, to speak about everything, to share—they are so important. To see even one of them disappear is awful.
I think the other thing that really needs to happen is for individuals to attend. The audience who already knows (and loves) what you do needs to buy two tickets: one for themselves and one for a friend, convince someone else to attend, and share ideas about how we can access deep pockets. That kind of thing. A book festival can’t just be the work and passion of the people organising. It needs to come from everyone in the room.
I’m not sure I have answered your question. Maybe ask it again in small words.
RN: Your summary of what funding is on point. I think it is imperative that people understand what funding is used for: better production value, more representative and inclusive programming, and more detailed, team-orientated organisation. I think too many people labour under the illusion that festival organisers get the kind of grant money that makes billionaires want to go into space because they hate being around the poor; I think even more people think festivals are the way they are because organisers are lazy or lack creativity. That could not be further from the truth.
Most festivals have poor production quality because of the funding that is available—it is a money thing: the more money, the higher the production value; the less there is, the more strained the organising team is to put on a high-quality production. The sound, the lighting, the stage dressing, the presenters, the attendees, the ushers, the seating, the programming—all of it can be boiled down to a monetary figure.
I asked the question about what funding is because too many people say: “Oh, well, why don’t you just ask this person or that organisation for money?” Easier said than done. Some money comes with too many strings, with more conditions than it is worth.
So there is what funding is and what it is not. What administrative processes have you had to wade through in order to get it? That is another consideration factor. Some grants require you to produce an aircraft training manual of paperwork just to get through the first round of applications. Others need spice from Arrakis.
The timelines for application, consideration, and approval differ from funding source to funding source. And, even where funding is approved, it might not arrive on time. I have stories of fixing holes with holes and making all kinds of promises to creditors. I might have taken out spiritual mortgages against my soul for the last edition of the DLF. But that is a story for another day.
FM: This reminds me of that “how do you become a millionaire in the book industry?” joke. This kind of work isn’t glamorous, it’s not going to allow you to buy all the pretty things, and I think it really is something you only do if you’re deeply invested emotionally.
I was chatting to one of the partner organisations we work with and part of the conversation was about how surprised organisations can be if you don’t say yes to their money. Like, they have no sense of the crucial need for their ethos to align with ours. So, yes, there are certainly groups that you just cannot hold hands with, for any amount of money.
Currently a significant amount of our funding has come from the government, from the City of Cape Town or the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture. Budgets have been cut here though, so it’s crucial that we find a way to access the corporate sector. We need to figure out how to make something like books as exciting as a rugby match because that gets supported.
The application processes to get grants or government funding—Eish, Rémy!—you know the pain. The documents you have to collect, the certified copies you need to stand in line for, the money you have to spend on audited financials, additional insurance, event application forms—the list feels pretty endless.
For me the reporting is where I find myself losing the will to live. The narrative reports are fine. It’s the financial reports that break me. Having to collect signed invoices from all the writers, affidavits where paper money was involved. It is inevitable that I make a mistake so I know sooner or later I will get a phone call asking me to correct something.
The other thing that really messes with us is the wait. You send in an application and then have no clue when you’re going to hear back about success or not. Which completely destroys your ability to plan properly.
I get so frustrated thinking about the amount of time I spend on funding related stuff that I could be spending on reading or curating discussions.
RN: All of what you describe, I know. Too intimately, even though I have not been at this as long as you have.
Honestly, one festival organiser to another, Gabriel needs to blow the damn trumpets before I clock a decade in this game. Because, damn.
What is your thought process when you curate the events and discussions of the Open Book Festival? This, of course, assumes that all of the funding has been secured and you know exactly who will be in attendance.
FM: I don’t think people fully understand how much work goes into doing this kind of thing. And also that your skill set needs to range from writing funding applications, to reading a vast amount, to being a travel agent of sorts, all the way through to carrying furniture around if that’s what needs doing. The glamour just doesn’t stop. The night of the Opening Bash, people all look so good and I’m just sweat collected in clothes from getting venues ready.
The curation of the actual events starts with reading—as close to everything as possible. In some cases Mervyn Sloman, the owner of the Book Lounge, or Dela Gwala, who is co-curating the festival this year, will have read something that I haven’t and the other way round, but we’ve worked together for long enough now to be able to trust each other’s readings.
From there it moves to long conversations that shift from books to themes to some half-remembered idea until we have planned conversations we think will be of interest to the audience, and which will work for the writers. Many of the writers, as you know, have probably spoken about their book or books a number of times, so we try to find ways to not make them have the same conversation over and over. We also try to stay away from events that throw writers together where there is no real resonance between their work other than they have all published thrillers or memoirs or short stories for example.
We also have subjects we prioritise, and if we feel like we haven’t included enough content on those subjects we will also look for ways to build additional events that explore those areas. We always have strong threads of programming that include mental health, colonisation and the legacies of apartheid, feminism, gender-based violence, masculinity, queerness, and so on.
And then we also look at ways of mixing things up—including poets, novelists, and writers of nonfiction together on stage can create some really interesting sessions that get people to think about a subject from new points of view. And having mentioned poets now, yes, we have poetry discussions and readings and then, usually, at least one performance-based event that closes the OBF.
Many of the conversations we plan are hard but necessary, and each year we look for ways to provide some easier content as well. The best examples of these are probably Writersports and Conversations With Mohale, two events that happen every year and which are definitely crowd favourites.
Seriously, though, the events just set the scene for the larger conversations that happen between events.
What’s your experience of this part of organising? I love the curation process. Do you as well? Is that what keeps you coming back for more?
RN: I think curation is one of the most underrated and misunderstood parts of literary festivals. The practice of selecting, arranging, matching, pairing, contrasting, and presenting art is well appreciated when it comes to exhibitions—because everyone can see the physical and tangible and understand that some great effort was expended in bringing what one sees to life. But in literary spaces, not so much.
For example, it is common for many people to ask why a certain “big-name writer” or “the most popular writer of the moment” is not featured at a festival. Funding and availability are just some of the factors that can determine whether certain writers make it to a festival or not. But there is something about organising the line-up for a literary festival that goes beyond rolling out a roster of names from buzzword literati.
More than popularity—which, I guess, is nice when sponsors are willing to throw money at an organiser just so they can have their brand associated with that one writer—I think there has to be relevance and resonance. By relevance, I mean that the writer’s work poses interesting questions or addresses curious dilemmas that are worthy of discussion. By resonance, I mean that the work finds amplification in the local imagination or experience. Those two are the most important consideration factors for me, after funding and venues, of course.
The process you outlined is one of the best: reading and engaging with literary works (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, visual art, theatre, music—the whole shebang); connecting themes across various mediums; pairing voices with the right topic on the most favourable platform; choosing when a particular panel discussion is hosted—all of these are crucial considerations for successful literary curation. I am not sure if there is an appreciation for the ways in which some of the most stimulating conversations at literary festivals have been envisioned by the organiser. Yes, there is plenty of room for experimentation and deviation, but just like so many good books or pieces of art, there are more things that occur through deliberate design than chance accident.
I find curation hard, at least here in Windhoek. Because I have to get just the right mix of people and personalities right to put bums on seats and justify the funding I have asked for. It is some high-wire stunt shit where the margins for error are reduced attendance and, therefore, diminished support the next time I ask for it and, eventually, failure and the demise of the festival.
But, at the same time, it is also rewarding because, like you, it feels like the opportunity—the mere chance—of some magic conversation happening on or off the stage has been seeded. When it will bloom, I do not know. But there is great satisfaction in preparing the soil.
Why do I keep coming back for more? I do not know. I merely know that every year I am challenged to make each edition of the festival, not bigger, but different: more engaging when it comes to the topics, more inclusive in terms of representation and access, and much riskier when it comes to combining different mediums of art. It is like, “when this bombs it will bomb hard, but, thankfully, it will take everyone with it…okay, let us try that!“
Hahaha. I joke.
But, also, not.
FM: You’re right. It can be really frustrating when people don’t recognise the amount of time that goes into planning a festival. And more than that. To me it isn’t just about the work you do in any one year, but also about the depth of knowledge that is so important. That archive in someone’s head that allows them to understand the shifts in someone’s writing, or how a new voice can rework an entire tradition—that kind of thing, that is often unseen.
The other part of the creation process that I never mentioned is about the audience. You can plan the most awesome conversations, but if the right people aren’t in the room, the conversation doesn’t unfold the way it should. By the right people—here in Cape Town—I mean a diverse and representative crowd. A room where there aren’t missing voices if that makes sense.
RN: Gosh, there is nothing like a good audience. Engaged and switched on; alert to the conversation’s topic and asking clear and curious questions; buying books—buy the damn books, yo!—talking about the work before, during, and after the discussion or festival—an audience is so important.
FM: We spent years trying to attract the big names, but yes, the budget just cannot stretch to cover the business-class flights and, in some cases, appearance fees that may make sense in the Global North, but not here. The Rand can only stretch so far.
Mervyn and I keep on trying to find a way to carve time out so we can attend your festival.
RN: Say less. 2026 we will make it happen.
FM: I’ve never even been to Windhoek and can only imagine the additional challenges you face curating the programme. While Cape Town isn’t massive, it is a big city, so I think we have it easier when it comes to finding people to include who we don’t have to fly in.
Do you battle to find new people to highlight, or to chair discussions who are based right there?
I think we, too, aren’t trying to make OBF bigger. We want more people to attend, sure, but not more events. And I always want to bring something fresh to the festival, something we haven’t included before. Which does come with some risk, but at the end of the day, this whole thing feels risky. That waiting for people to book tickets once the programme is live—what is wrong with people that they wait until the last minute? It’s lucky I am so busy in the month before the OBF or I think I would spend far too much time watching the tickets not sell.
RN: Because the Doek Literary Festival is free to attend, I do not have to worry about ticket sales. That, for me, would be a stress I could not cope with—I would rather people spent their money on purchasing the writers’ books. Even though it is free you never know about the attendance. The past two editions have been well attended, though. And I think it might be thanks to a combination of the festival’s novelty; the curation and design of the festival experience thanks to our design partner, Turipamwe; and the eclectic writers, poets, and visual artists we have been lucky enough to have. Then, also, there are not many literary events on our local or national calendar so that piques interest in it quite a bit.
FM: Really awesome that the entire Doek Literary Festival is free.
How do you manage your capacities?
We have a fair number of free sessions and also do loads of comps, but the number of people who book or get a comp who don’t arrive is really frustrating.
RN: The festival is built around Windhoek’s realities: place, cost, calendar.
The past two editions have been hosted at the Goethe-Institut Namibia in the heart of the city; everyone knows where the venue is, so that saves on energy spent publicising the space. We have all of the events at that one place (the auditorium and the courtyard), which negates the need for juggling events at different venues.
In terms of cost, charging would alienate a large core audience. We already have the festival in the center of town; I know that transport to the place can be a challenge for a certain demographic. So we keep access free thanks to support we receive from our long-time partner Bank Windhoek and other literary organisations that come onboard each year. First it was the University of East Anglia’s International Chair of Creative Writing and then it was the Windham-Campbell Prizes. Based on the financial support we get, we make sure all of the costs are covered therein.
FM: Do people have to book or can they just rock up?
RN: People just show up. No need to RSVP, except for the creative writing workshops because seating is limited.
Calendar is where the rubber hits the pavement. The festival is four days long, Wednesday to Saturday, with all events being hosted in the evenings (two conversations and a musical or poetry reading—by 22h00 people are headed home because, well, jobs…) except for the creative writing workshops which take place on Saturday morning. On Saturday evening the festival guests and organisers retrieve their dancing shoes and on Sunday, everyone heads home.
FM: I love the idea of everything happening at times that take into account people’s work commitments, and where people don’t have to choose what they’re going to attend.
RN: For me, there would be no point in having a literary festival here if the people it is meant to serve could not attend it. So most of the programming has to take into account the ordinary Windhoeker’s ways and means. I have also found that halving the attention, in terms of scheduling more than one event at the same time, results in a quarter of the attention. So, for us, here, focus is the key.
FM: I especially love it when I see writers attending each others’ events. Or when I see writers pretty much camped out in the foyer of the Homecoming Centre, sharing themselves with such generosity. Do you have a green room? I think OBF is the space it is partly because there isn’t a green room.
RN: For the most part, Windhoek is the green room because the events only take place in the evening. Festival guests are encouraged to explore Windhoek at their leisure. Because of the tight and focused programming, everyone attends everyone else’s conversations.
When are you in the festival organiser “zone”? That moment when everything you touch turns to “done!”?
FM: I think I get into the zone the week of the OBF. At that stage, most of the team is on-site, everyone knows what their roles are; I’ve run through the entire programme with the tech team so they know what needs to happen when; and I have said cheers to the cats and moved closer to town. My own life gets pared right down so that pretty much all I am at that stage is the Open Book Festival. And cheese. All the cheese I eat during the festival Hahaha. The zone for me is a hyper aware state where I am constantly checking things.
RN: When the festival rolls around Windhoek becomes a capital city, alive with dope, progressive conversations; every time we have it I meet new people who are passionate about literature in their own special ways. Deep, curious, but shy readers; aspiring writers who, for once, can see what one of the end-goals and possibility of pursuing their writing might look like right in front of them, three seats away answering their questions about writing craft; publishers, editors, and the person who gave me my first library card—that is my “in the zone” moment, when that crazy, pageless Google Document with all of its tick-boxes, flight schedules, accommodation details, list of allergies and dietary preferences, and venue timetables finally makes sense—when I see all of these people in one place talking to each other, hanging out, just basking in the gravitational alchemy of storytelling and all of the people it attracts. At that high point is probably when the foolish idea of “let’s do this again” pops into my head.
FM: I’m interested in your post-festival routine as well. Yes, there’s the report writing and paying invoices and all sorts, but do you have any post fest rituals?
Ours usually involves going to the aquarium and spending some quality time watching the jellyfish and the kelp forest.
No talking.
Just watching the water.
There’s usually an octopus as well.
RN: Post-festival this place becomes a hum-drum why-are-you-not-married, why-do-you-not-have-children, she-was-asking-for-it-wearing-that-skirt, conservative capital village that makes me fall into a noxious malaise. Like, do-not-give-me-access-to-the-nuclear-codes kind of volatile. Because, what do you mean I must now engage in conversations about conservation without land restitution? Ag, nee dankie! Man, even thinking about it makes me bust out my bad Afrikaans.
It takes months to get over the festival high, to be honest. And it does not help that we only have the festival every two years because it takes that long to secure funding. But there is always a new edition of the literary magazine to put together and awards to coordinate. I block out the post-festival blues with work. The first one took me about a year to get over. The second one, less time. Maybe when the third edition rolls around I will have a better routine down. But, for now, after the last flight leaves, I am quite ready for an apocalyptic world reset.
What is one thing you would like to add to the Open Book Festival? By the third edition of the Doek Literary Festival I need to have gotten better at vinyl DJ-ing because our last one ended in a proper dance party. Next time I will spin proper vinyl vibes. I am already looking at the potential list of invitees and wondering, “But do they dance?” Hahahahaha.
FM: The more you speak about it, the more I realise I must get there for the next one—if only to see the DJ skills in action.
What would I add to the Fest?
Sjoe! There are all sorts of ideas we have that will hopefully happen one day. Mervyn and I have spoken about an OBF journal many times. We’ve just run our first Writers’ Retreat which was amazing and I would love for that to become an annual thing. I’d love to have the budget to invite curators from other African festivals to OBF to share ideas with each other. I’d love to have supper sessions with no end time—food, music, reading, and conversation. And maybe even some dancing.
RN: Dancing is a must.
FM: So many things.
RN: So many ideas, so little time. So little funding!
I would like to incorporate more visual art, and a film screening. Food is a component I would love to add! And, and, and…
FM: If you brought other elements into the festival do you think you would work with someone to curate that, or would you want to do it yourself? We’ve done a film screening, but I know that screenings often involve getting rights and a bunch of things I would have to learn about.
RN: I have dreamed long and hard about all of the other elements; I could curate them—but I would not mind working with someone else to make them come to reality. Festivals are the best testing grounds for collaborative creative projects, I think.
FM: What you say about collaboration resonates with me. I truly love collaborating with the right people – the great imaginings.
I’m not sure why this is popping into my head now, but have you tried to wrap your head around doing any of this work pre-internet?
I’m picturing sending a letter into the wild and then waiting—for how long?! – and then shouldering the expense of a phone call. From a landline. I guess if that’s what you know then that’s fine, but thinking about it from 2025, it causes much anxiety.
RN: This is the one area of organisation that technology has really smoothened out. Because if I have to lick a stamp and deal with the Namibian Postal Service you are definitely attending my literary festival.
The things we do for the love of literature.
FM: The rhythm of your year does sound hard. The gap between one and the next sounds intense, even if you have the journal to take the edge off. My year is very different; I am often still in the midst of reporting when we start reading for the following year. And the planning for Youth Fest needs to be done, as well as Workshop Week.
OBF really is a year-round project with a fair amount of juggling. And yes, each part comes with the “throw hands in the air and swear never to do this again” moments, but then the event happens and you see children have an amazing time, or really cool zines getting made, or people leaving an event with such excitement on their faces that all that disappears.
RN: So…Everyone Dies, your authorial debut, sounds like the perfect ending of the literary world.
FM: Ah, the collection. It is a strange one. It’s hard to call it a collection of short stories. It’s more a collection of fragments which I accidentally published. Getting up on stage to speak about it was so far out of my comfort zone. I don’t really have memories of what I said out loud but can remember various internal talks I had with myself that were mostly along the lines of “stop moving your arms around/stop swinging your legs/try to sit still dammit”.
The title happened because I kept trying to write novels and then would kill my characters almost immediately. I ended up playing around with those pieces and together they became a thing that explores outsiderness, trauma, and grief—that kind of thing.
When my dad heard I was still writing he asked “Is it still depressing?” which is a review of sorts. But I should have a new thing out in time for Open Book this year which I’m quite excited about.
RN: “Accidentally published”? And also won the HSS Award for? Talk about making the rest of us feel bad.
What was the writing process for Everyone Dies like? I am thinking of it like putting a festival together, I guess—what was the decision-making process for choosing one story over another and how did you decide to arrange them?
I like that they are presented as “series” instead of “stories.” It is my feeling that more writers should be allowed to decide on the presentation of their stories. It leads to interesting creations and reception.
FM: Ah, the writing.
Maybe we can start before the publishing? I’ve always written. I love writing. It soothes me, it makes me laugh, it feels like sinking the black ball at the right time with one-eye closed, it feels like a soundtrack playing behind everything. But I never wrote with the idea of publishing. So I got extremely lucky I think. That being said, I don’t know that anyone other than Karina M. Szczurek from Karavan Press would have published Everyone Dies.
The collection is pulled from work that stretches back 20 to 25 years ago through to far more recent—let us call it “stuff”. Some of the pieces I included definitely had a this-goes-here feel. Others I wasn’t sure about including at all—I put them in and then Karina never suggested we take them out. Because so much of me was trying not to go down the publishing road, I battled to be intentional about the process. It was more like sneaking up on myself.
All of that aside, though, I cannot say enough good things about the experience I have had with Karina. At no point did I feel like I couldn’t have what I wanted. So yes, I agree there, writers should definitely have a say in what ends up in the world.
What about you? Are you working on anything right now? I absolutely loved Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space. So much in there. And ah, some really delicious sentences.
RN: What am I working on now? Who sent you? And how much are they paying you?
FM: If someone were paying me, how much would I need to give you in order to hear something about the work that has you busy? Everyone needs a rate card.
RN: If you paid me my asking fee you would have to cancel OBF for two or three years and no one wants that.
I think my favourite part of writing is getting to work with editors. It is how I learned a lot of the craft, to be honest. And when one is paired with a great editor it feels like being in tandem with an excellent dancer, a good lead who knows the rhythm of the music playing, and, most importantly, what you are able to do on the dance floor. So, it is good that you had a positive experience.
Just before the world ends, who—living or dead—would you have in conversation?
FM: Sounds like you have a date and time. Because it kinda feels like it’s not far away.
RN: I do not know when, but history has taught me that doom always keeps its appointments.
FM: That aside, it’s a tough question. But I would love to hear Ocean Vuong, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Haruki Murakami, Ursula Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood—and so many more.
Rémy, how do I pick one?
RN: Have them all. Choices are for poor people. Ha!
FM: If I’d know that I would have kept on writing.