View noticesCape Town's Open Book Festival returns for its 2026 edition
The Open Book Festival, Cape Town's flagship literary event, returns to the city from 4 to 6 September 2026, this year hosted at the HCC: Homecoming Centre, formerly known as The Fugard Theatre.
A fixture on the city's literary calendar since 2011, the festival will once again bring South African and international authors together for panels, readings, book launches and community conversations.
The September gathering is the culmination of a year-round programme spanning three stages, Brittle Paper reports.
The season opened with Youth Fest in March, a free, community-facing initiative that sends storytellers, writers and poets into schools and libraries in underfunded parts of Cape Town, distributing books as it goes.
That was followed by Workshop Week in June, a low-cost, skills-focused programme at Bertha House in Mowbray offering sessions on craft across genres, as well as hands-on workshops in comics and calligraphy.
The main festival in September rounds things off with around 60 events over three days, built around drawing top writers and audiences, showcasing the best of South African writing, nurturing a love of reading among the city's youth, and reflecting Cape Town's diversity.
Several sessions this year are aimed squarely at readers following African and diaspora literature. Athambile Masola sits down with Maneo Mohale to discuss Black women's histories of resistance and erasure, while I.O. Echeruo, Lebogang Matseke and Mphuthumi Ntabeni join vangile gantsho to explore African cosmologies and the blurred boundary between the seen and unseen worlds.
Speculative fiction also gets dedicated attention, with John Hunt and Keely Shinners joining Echeruo for Between Two Worlds, a discussion of novels that straddle the familiar and the fantastic, while a Beyond Dystopia workshop hosted 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 features heavily across the programme. Koleka Putuma, Gabeba Baderoon and Sanah Ahsan are among the poets closing the festival at New Worlds in Bloom, while a special Pass Me the Mic showcase marks 50 years since the 1976 Soweto Youth Uprising. The launch of New Contrast 212 will honour poets Diana Ferrus and Zoë Wicomb, with readings from Pumla Dineo Gqola, Zubeida Jaffer and Ingrid de Kok, among others.
Fiction is well represented too, with Sue Nyathi, Kopano Matlwa and Krystle Zara Appiah appearing across multiple panels exploring love, class and the body. Publishers Morné Bam of Penguin Random House, Jessica Powers of Catalyst Press and Stevlyn Vermeulen of Jonathan Ball will discuss AI, algorithms and the future of South African publishing in a session titled We're Still Human. Journalist and comedian Rebecca Davis brings a lighter touch with a one-woman show on AI and human obsolescence, and the festival closes with its long-running Writersports and Letterhead Quiz events.
Most sessions are priced at R50, with a number of free events for younger readers and community programming. Tickets and the full schedule are available via the Open Book Festival's website.