The 5th annual Franschhoek Literary Festival which takes place this weekend, from 13 to 15 May, will commemorate the late Cape Town poet, Stephen Watson. Authors, Christopher Hope and Imraan Coovadia will pay tribute to Watson on Saturday 14 May at 14:30 in The Screening Room.
Watson (56), who sadly passed away on 10 April 2011 after suffering from cancer, was a South African academic and poet who dedicated much of his work to chronicling the natural beauty of the Cape. He was professor of English at the University of Cape Town and the Director of the Writing Centre at UCT, as well as one of the founders of the Creative Writing Program.
Among various awards, Watson received the English Academy’s Thomas Pringle Award in January this year for his short story, Buiten Street, published in New Contrast.
“Stephen was as careful and thoughtful and firm in finding his own positions as in composing his lines and paragraphs,” said Imraan Coovadia, Watson’s colleague at UCT. “In person, however, he was almost unfailingly courteous, engaged, unexpected in the direction of his thoughts, generous in his intelligence, and insistent only in his humane temperament. He cared to be a human being before a poet, and to be a poet before a professor,” added Coovadia.
Collections of Watson’s poetry include earlier works In This City (1986), Return of the moon: Versions from the /Xam (1991) and Presence of the Earth: New Poems(1995), as well as the more recent The Light Echo And Other Poems (2007). Other written works include A City Imagined: Cape Town and the Meanings of a Place(2006) and The Music in the Ice (2010).
“Before he fell ill, Stephen had agreed to be in conversation at the FLF with Christopher Hope about The Music in the Ice. This event will celebrate the writer and the man who did so much for young South African writers, and whose loss is a major tragedy,” said Jenny Hobbs, director of the FLF.
“Stephen Watson was a rare writer. His San poems: his walking poems; his love poems and his essays will be read for as long as South Africans look for the best things their poets have done. He was, too, a reader and a critic of great delicacy and subtle power,” said Christopher Hope. “I never knew Stephen to say anything about writers and writing that didn’t make me want to review and re-think my own thoughts and my prejudices. More than anything, Stephen helped other writers to find their own ways of saying. I was lucky enough to have known Stephen for a long time. Now he has gone and I miss him very much, and so will South African letters. He is irreplaceable,” he added.
The event will take place at 14:30 on Saturday 14 May in the Screening Room atLe Quartier Francais.
For more information about the programme at Franschhoek Festival this year, visit www.flf.org.za.
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