In the most stunning place in the world, Cape Town, South Africa, hotels are splendid compliments to the natural splendor that surrounds the place. With gorgeous beaches, lush vegetation, and a rich urban landscape, there is much to see and do here. The busy traveler will find an enormous array of distractions to keep the days full and the nights exciting, and the laid-back tourist will find endless choices for places to hunker down and enjoy passing the time in luxury. The night life is another world entirely, with clubs playing the most elegant combinations of traditional and contemporary beats, and restaurants that cater to a selective and extremely cosmopolitan clientele.
For the literary traveler, there are fantastic adventures here. A rich tradition of writers and intellectuals, working in and beyond the 11 official languages, is accompanied by a rich tradition and reverence for the written word. The Cape Town Book Fair then, is a wonderful example of where the literary arts are in South Africa today. Begun in 2005, this fair is the only one of its kind in Sub-Saharan Africa, and is devoted to the promotion of new publishing, as well as a lively and vibrant forum for writers, publishers, agents, and the general reading public to discuss and debate all the current issues in bookmaking today.
Offering something for everyone, the Cape Town Book Fair has special events and workshops for children, author readings from some of the most exciting writers on the continent (and beyond), as well as public discussions on ideas inherent to the literary world. Noting that we are living in interesting times, like in the old Chinese curse, the book world contains nearly every aspect of the social, cultural, and political worlds. In South Africa, each of these worlds is enormously complex, and the recent years have been devoted to discussing this complexity. Using this opportunity to have so many bright minds in one place, this remarkably successful fair has been putting forth agendas toward making connections between concerns of writers in South Africa with Nigeria and other parts of Africa, and extending these concerns to the world at large. Offering a heady mix of popular literature to literary fiction and beyond, the fair offers a deep look inside the world we all inhabit.