A National Arts Festival delegation is on its way to Edinburgh, Scotland, to share SA’s top festival with the best of the global arts-world, and to see what can be brought back to Grahamstown from this internationally renowned arts-embracing city.

In May this year, budding young hip-hop poet Natasha Tafari attended a Hands On! Masks Off! Workshop, hosted by the National Arts Festival at the Artscape Theatre in Cape Town. There she was presented with the exciting prospect of travelling to Grahamstown to attend the “real thing” in July.

Writer Phillippa Yaa de Villiers recently returned from an international residency at the Possa Porta writer’s festival in Belgium. This was part of her prize as the first winner of the National Arts Festival’s Writing beyond the Fringe programme.