Mozambique’s Festival Literatas 2017, the third edition of the literary festival, will be running from October 6-8, 2017. The festival will happen in Matola Municipal Auditorium under the motto “Think Identities”.
2015 was a special time for the Mozambique Municipality of Matola as they hosted the inaugural Festival Literatas. Matola is the largest suburb of the Mozambique capital, Maputo, and adjacent to it on the west. The idea was to transform it into a cathedral of arts through book, music and plastic arts and featured 50 national artists among them artists, actors, musicians and writers. The writers who featured at that event were Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa and Calane da Silva.
Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa is a Mozambican writer who has written a raft of works like Ualalapi (1987), Orgia dos loucos (1990), Histórias de amor e espanto (1999), No reino dos abutres (2002), Os sobreviventes da noite (2005), Choriro (2009), and Entre as Memórias Silenciadas (2013). Calane da Silva on his part is a Mozambican poet, writer and journalist who has written work like Dos meninos da Malanga (1982) and Lírica do Imponderável e outros poemas do ser e do estar (2004).
The second edition of the festival with the theme “City of Books” happened in Matola with the conjunction with the Kuphaluxa Literary Movement.
The 2017 edition of the festival is set to happen in the same venue it has happened for the last two years. There has been confirmations from writers, musicians, academics’ from Angola, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Brazil and the host country Mozambique. The event will be opened by Mozambican Minister of Culture and Tourism Silva Dunduro.
As we head towards the big event, the organisers will be doing a series of events in the build-up including the official release of the names of those who will feature in July.
We shall be keeping you abreast of the happenings in Matola. If you are planning on heading there I suggest that you brush up on your Portuguese.
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