Two New Members of the Executive Committee Welcomed

Carole Bloch, Director of the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA), a multilingual education organisation affiliated to the University of Cape Town with a focus on transforming approaches to early biliteracy teaching and learning, developing story books, reading materials, and nurturing a love of reading through the development of reading clubs, and Mervyn Sloman, who opened the Book Lounge in Cape Town in December 2007, in the belief that there was space for a bookshop that did things a little differently.

Bloch is the founder and implementing leader of Nal’ibali National Reading – for Enjoyment Campaign and series editor for Best Loved Tales. Among her areas of academic specialisation are early literacy and biliteracy learning and teaching, multilingual reading and promotion and children’s literature development in African settings.

Sloman says that at the core of the Book Lounge is the belief that a bookshop is more than just a retail space in which the product sold happens to be books. A bookshop is a space in which ideas should be exchanged and debated, a space which provides access to writers for readers and vice-versa. PEN South Africa recently held two ‘PEN dialogue events’, Sexuality and the law: a debate on cultural politics in Africa with South African PEN and The Politics of Publishing and Bookselling at the Book Lounge. In August 2008, PASA (Publishers Association of South Africa) voted the Book Lounge the best independent bookshop in SA (just eight months after opening) and a year later it was voted the best overall bookshop in South Africa.

Sloman also founded Open Book Cape Town in 2011, an international literary festival, which has become an annual event. It has four main goals: to present a truly international literary festival in Cape Town; to promote South African writers to an international audience; to increase the love of books and reading among the youth of Cape Town; and to encourage diverse audiences to attend events at the festival.