Date: 25 - 31 July 2011
The Bloody Book Week is Africa’s first crime book festival and runs this week from Monday through to Saturday 30th July. International authors are joining local authors in a range of events from a crime writing tutorial to a whodunit dinner.
Location: It is taking place all over Joburg: From Montecasino to Melville as well as Braamfontein.
From CSI to Dexter, from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to Jeffery Deaver, crime is the subject of writing (fiction and non-fiction), television and movies. It is a big-money genre that is growing rapidly and South Africa is no exception as a crop of local authors take on the big international writers at their own game.
The Bloody Book Week: Mystery. Mayhem. Murder. running from Tuesday 25th – Sunday 31st July 2011.
The brainchild of talkshow host, author and book event promoter, Jenny Crwys-Williams, the first Bloody Book Week features a bestselling international crime writer festival and a selection of some of South Africa’s finest crime writing talent, both fiction and non-fiction.
The festival has had a warm reception from participating publishers, booksellers and authors. Crwys-Williams hopes to extend the reach of The Bloody Book Week to Joburg-based bookclubs to spread the reach of the event across the city. Everyone, she says, is welcome. For the last five years Crwys-Williams has hosted one evening a year where international crime writers (John Connolly, Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver, Peter Robinson, Deon Meyer, etc) have spent an evening with local authors from Mike Nicol to Margie Orford. “In many ways, The Bloody Book Week is an extension of those evenings,” she says. “They illustrated how popular crime writing is and how people are fascinated by it.” She adds that with powerful young writers such as Sifiso Mzobe coming onto the scene, it seemed that the time had come to establish a crime book festival on the African continent. “People went mad when US crime author Tess Gerritsen visited South Africa earlier this year, but we don’t hear enough about other countries going mad when our own authors, such as Deon Meyer, visited them. No we will.”
The inaugural Bloody Book Week will feature non-fiction writers such as serial killer profiler Micki Pistorius alongside the award-winning British crime writer Michael Robotham, with a host of other outstanding South African crime novelists.
“The crime book festival will represent a positive image of the South African crime writing industry and eventually will add to tourism in Joburg,” says Crwys-Williams.
Full schedule of events is listed here.