Geneva Writers' Group at BooksBooksBooks in Lausanne, for Offshoots readings

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The Geneva Writers’ Group is celebrating two major events in the run-up to its annual international writers conference. The 20th anniversary of the group’s Offshoots magazine is out. And Petina Gappah, one of the group’s members, has just won the Guardian First Book Award 2009.

Gappah is a trade lawyer in Geneva who has written a collection of stories about her native Zimbabwe. Her book, An Elegy for Easterly, is only the second collection of short stories to win the award.

Gappah’s story from the collection, “The cracked Pink Lips of Rosie’s…”, was published in the October 2007 edition of Offshoots, the magazine of collected writing published every two years by the group.

Matthew Wake opened BooksBooksBooks in Lausanne in late 2008

The Geneva Writers’ Group has been honouring the 20th anniversary of Offshoots with readings by authors whose works appear in the 2009 edition. One reading took place in Geneva in October and the other at Booksbooksbooks in Lausanne at the end of November.

The editor of the 2009 edition, Jo Ann Hansen Rasch, told GenevaLunch that this edition marks something of a turning point for the group, offering a new view of the role such a collection can play for writers’ collectives in the age of the Internet. When the magazine was created in 1989, the group had many unpublished writers and Offshoots provided a chance to have something published. “The magazine is very important to the writers, but not in the same way to all writers. Some of them have blogs. The older writers in the group have evolved a great deal, and the new ones coming in now are often already published.” Rasch is a longtime member of the group whose work has been published and whose most recent work is Blowing Feathers, a 2008 memoir of her mother put together from a lifetime of scraps of writing.

Writing is a mostly private business but the group, which holds regular workshops for members, brings their work out into the open with the Geneva Writers Conference that it organizes every two years. The next one will take place over a weekend in February 2010 at Webster University: a two-day conference with speakers, workshops, readings and other events. The conference, which sells out regularly, has space for 200 writers. Highlights of the 2010 meeting include presentations by award-winning author Thomas E Kennedy on fiction, and literary agents Jane Dystel and Karolina Sutton.

5-7 February 2010 – Geneva Writers Conference, details

Where to find Offshoots

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