Late last year we took part in the e-Learning Festival at the Durban University of Technology, presenting a session on our work with the KZN Literary Tourism project.
The KZN Literary Tourism research project is now in its ninth year of operation. Literary Tourism is tourism that deals with places and events from fictional texts as well as the lives of their authors. This could include following the route a fictional character charts in a novel, visiting particular settings from a story or tracking down the haunts of a novelist.
Literary tourists are specifically interested in how places have influenced writing and at the same time how writing has created place. In order to become a literary tourist you need little more than your favourite novel and an adventurous spirit. However there are literary guides, literary maps and literary tours to help you on your way.
The project runs an active website where it hosts a number of resources for research. These include a database of author profiles, literary videos, audio clips of writers reading their work, and digital versions of the literary trails produced by the project. All research produced by the project is also available through the research section of the website. This presentation will look at the KZN Literary Tourism project and the e-resources it has produced over the past few years.
